Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Future of programming languages

Here you can find a video of Anders Hejlsberg talking about his predictions on future programming languages development. The talk is extremely interesting so I recommend you watch it. Anders basically predicts, that programming languages will get more and more declarative, which means that developers will be telling the machine what to do instead of how to do it. Just like SQL. This would allow a virtual machine (or parser) to intelligently optimize work depending on environment - ex. splitting a job to concurrent tasks. Anders shows example of LINQ query being executed two times faster when Parallel Extensions are used.

Another thing mentioned is introducing of dynamic typing elements into statically typed languages. The example Anders provides shows how usage of reflection mechanism in order to call a method can be simplified by declaring a dynamic type.

In my opinion this is very interesting and surely has its usages. But there are many programming areas, where a developer has to call appropriate libraries in right order and that's about it. In RAD environments I'd say it's the most part of code that is being produced. Not much changes coming here.

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