According to Hejlsberg the three major trends for the future of programming languages are: Declarative, Concurrent and Dynamic. Here is a brief description of these trends:
Today most programming languages are imperative in nature. Declarative programming concerns itself more with the what of the programming than the how. In the talk Hejlsberg gave the great and kind of classic example using LINQ to declare what we mean for a piece of code to do rather than imperatively in standard C# code it up in a mess of code that is very hard to read for later maintenance of the code.
Concurrent is of course in .NET embodied in the Parallel Extensions for .NET: Parallel Computing Developing Center (team blog: Parallel Programming with .NET) which will add the ability to execute pieces of code in parallel simply by calling .AsParallel(). This will be very powerful and will also raise the question of coding more in a functional programming style like in F# so that is is possible to isolate pieces of code that may run in parallel without side effects that will make the whole program unstable.
Where Dynamic is concerned Hejlsberg sees a future fusing of Dynamic and Static languages. This means that dynamic languages will gain some of the advantages of static languages and get better IDE and code time experiences and the static languages will gain behavior that will make them seem and feel as though they are more dynamic. He goes on to point out that the future holds the ability to treat the compiler more as a service that you may call in the run time over some API to deliver a piece of code that may be executed as efficiently as if it were coded by hand. This is the natural evolvement of the emission of code in the run time which is a messy and tricky business – yet potentially very rewarding.
(Note: I am speaking at this years Øredev conference about exactly this; the emission of code in the run time under the advanced topic Dynamic Code.)
To conclude Hejlsberg could not resist the opportunity, and why should he, to give a pointer to Java on the direction he sees Java needs to take to be a relevant language even in the future. Guess he has to tease a bit right. I’ll leave the exact quote as an Easter egg for you at the end of his video. ;~) He also concluded that we live in very exiting times where programming languages are concerned. This is of course easy to agree with!
Cheers,
M.
P.S.: Definitely worth a watch is the talk Anders Hejlsberg gave at this years JAOO conference: The future of programming languages.
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posted @ Wednesday, October 22, 2008 12:19 AM