Not what you think it will be.
I read some article on Reddit (actually the comments) where some guest lecturer spoke to a group and suggested that the future of programming is domain specific languages, and that they should focus on this.
Today when people tell me what the future of programming is, I run away. Every since my first programming job back in 1981, I've heard a million people make these kinds of predictions. The first I remember was "The Yourdon Look", some classes we were forced to take on Data Flow Diagrams or something like it. Over the years there have been so many I've lost interest in even counting them.
Object-Oriented programming seemed a revolution, but it didn't change how we programmed as much as just made some things easier, some things harder. Even then it took a whole generation to convert even a portion of programmers, and now it sure appears to be far less of a panacea than was proclaimed in the early days. My first brush with OOP was the Smalltalk edition of Byte, and later I "invented" some C OO extensions for Deltagraph (which are embarrassing today but helped a little). It wasn't a revolution, just an improvement. Or not.
So who predicted the internet, the web? The biggest change in programming ever as far as I know didn't exist 15 years ago (at least not to most people). Not even the high and might (like Bill Gates) saw the change coming.
I was in Silicon Valley working for Remedy when Netscape went public. Then I worked at Apple for a few months before coming back to Texas. I still didn't realize the web was going to change so much. D'oh, I missed the whole Dot Com gold rush. But no one realized in 1995 that the web would touch and affect virtually everything we do, not to mention all the crap we would have to learn!
Who at the time predicted that the other big change would dominate things - the whole open source movement. If someone had told me in 1995 that 15 years later one could run an entire large international business and spend $0 on software I would have laughed. Yet today not only because of the first pioneers (like Linux) but because the internet existed to support it. In the 80's I read paper magazines to find out what was going on in the programming world (like Byte). With the advent of the internet, it became possible to communicate with people all over the world, discuss and collaborate on software development, and distribute the work to everyone.
Not one person that I remember ever predicted this either.
If someone had told me 5 years ago that in 9 months this year 1 Billion Apps would be downloaded to a phone I would have laughed too. Phones were for calling and had crappy built in apps no one really used. Who called this one? Yes, its a bad pun.
So pardon me if I regard all predictions of the future of programming with an ocean of salt. I've heard for decades seemingly that programming was almost dead and we would no longer be needed like the Luddites of old. Anyone could learn to program, it was no longer a tech function, just push some buttons, drag a few icons, and presto! and application pops out.
Maybe someday we will be obsolete. But it won't be something we predict. The future is not some slightly altered version of what you see today. It's going to be different. Whatever is the new big deal won't come from a predictable path, a consensus opinion, a committee. It might be a Steve Jobs type person with an insane idea and the people to make it work. It might be some researcher with a simple idea (Tim Berners-Lee). Heck it might be aliens for all we know.
The biggest mistake people who predict the future make is assuming it will be just like the present, only more futuristic. In ancient times prophets usually got stoned if they make predictions that didn't come true, which tended to limit the prediction business. Today, its much easier, you can write a book, give a lecture, or more likely, post to a blog. No one will stone you.
No matter what anyone says, the future of programming is ... something.
If I had to make a prediction (sans stoning) I would say we will still be writing some kind of code for a long time until the day comes when the programmer will be a robot, who will then write the code for us. Of course someone wrote the code for the robot, and if thats the programmer who is going to be replaced, I imagine there will be bugs!
softwaredev0 05/08/2009 05:02
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Dave Aronson 05/08/2009 11:34
Used to be, if you made a bad prediction, you got stoned. Nowadays, if you get stoned, you make a bad prediction. ;-)
matt 05/08/2009 13:48
programming will always be like it is now with many options to choose from to suit your needs, unlike engineering programming does not live in a set world with set rules, we imagine how we want to represent abstract ideas and everyones imagination is different.
Anonymous 05/08/2009 14:57
The world is full of bogus commentary on everything. Especially on things hard, and which lack social institutions for feedback and pruning. That doesn't mean valid commentary is impossible.
Few even attempt it. How much science fiction is consistent with current mainstream products, let alone what's in trade journals, let alone research? Sure, keeping in touch with the cutting edge of several fields is hard. Especially outside of a few geographically constrained institutional communities. But how hard really?
Timing is often hard. Not projective "N bytes/$ in year X". Or "tablet pc's like this (early '90's) prototype will become economically feasible in about 10 years". But how long it will take for social and economic markets to gel. Would low-cost laptops happen now, or in five years? Intel tried really hard to make it five years. M$ delayed javascript by a decade (so far). It was clear garbage collection was going to be the right thing by the early 1980's. But it took waiting for Java to persuade the great unwashed. It was clear multiple dispatch was critical about the same time. Almost made into Javascript last year. Didn't. Still waiting.
Form is hard. Societal paths is hard. The puzzle in the 1980's wasn't whether global networks would change the world, but whether arpanet would become the internet, surviving walled gardens, telco cluelessness ("flat rate?!? wtf?"), and government. Before Netscape, before Mozilla, when there was just tbl's Next browser, hypertext had already had an active community for almost a decade. The need was clear, and there were various efforts puttering along. Predicting future existence was easy. Predicting details and timing was hard. If NCSA Mosaic had supported remote page editing, like tbl's browser did, maybe we wouldn't have had to wait for years and wikis to get collaborative pages. But that we eventually would, that was a no-brainer. There were web api's by the early '90's. But then M$ crippled js, and the boom distracted people from infrastructure, so they took an extra decade to catch on.
Programming languages are a particularly odd choice for suggesting prediction is intractable. They've had such a dysfunctional market, their evolution has been horribly glacial. Looking to predict cool new features for the 2010's? Start with the not-small set of capabilities we've had over the last two decades that haven't yet made it into widespread use yet. Surprised by multicore issues? Only if one hasn't been paying attention for more than a decade.
GUI's? Video conferencing? Cell phones? It's not that these were great surprises, or were hidden in a field of also-ran's, now forgotten. It's mostly just been a multi-decade question of "will I die of old age before I can afford one of those". Which is one easy way to make good predictions.
I want a pocket thermal infrared camera. Was a $100k export-restricted box. Now a $1k home-inspection handheld. The manufacturing tech for cheap decent resolution is almost in place. Then the wait for economics to come together. It won't be a surprise. Or somehow profoundly unpredictable. The only question is whether I'll live to see it. Tech is advancing so very sloooowwwwwwllllyyyy.
Pop 05/08/2009 16:08
Dont worry nobody will be replaced, We are still busy thinking if RIA or Browser is the way to go for GUI hahaha we are still in the caverns age of IT and Computer Science. Science studies begin thousands years ago and we still not know nothing about, IT and Computers is the same shit. Programmers will be until I die and more more years ahead.
The guy who wrote that is a hippie that does not have nothing to do and just smoking something.
me 05/27/2009 19:08
Vannevar Bush predicted the Web, see his article from 1945 - http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush
josef b. 05/31/2009 19:39
Yup, I was going to mention Vannavar Bush. But, there have been many others, especially in Science Fiction and Fantasy.