Prognostications: What Will Programming Look Like in 2035?

Prognostication is always fun, whether you're thinking up your own predictions, or reading someone else's. As apparently a great many people have noted, "prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." (Was that Yogi Berra? Niels Bohr? Einstein? Mark Twain? Is it an ancient Chinese proverb?) This reality does not faze Bruce Eckel, who just posted Programming in the Mid-Future. What's the "mid-future"? About 25 years from now. Bruce starts out with: In 25 years or so, we'll look at the current morass as only a small step above assembly-language programming. An interesting way to look at this is to think back to the state of programming 25 years ago, in 1985. If you take that state, compare it to today's state, then "project" linearly into the future, maybe you can guess what programming witll be like in 2035. Well, certainly you can guess, but is it likely that you'd be right? A thought experiment: pretend it's 1985, and think about what programming was like in 1960 (impossible even for me to accomplish except by referencing historical documents). What would someone in 1985 have thought programming would be like in 2010, by thinking back to the state of programming in 1960? Or, go back even further, with the aid of something like the Wikipedia's History of programming languages, and see if any longer term trends seem to remain approximately constant. Let's try this, j...

Date: March, 11 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/editor/archive/2010/03/11/prognostications-what-will-programming-look-2035

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