Programming languages of the future

[Shalmanese]

Bleh, I'm stuck in a perl lecture right now and absolutely hating the language, its designed on an old paradigm which I believe to be outdated.

What sort of features do you think we will be looking at for the programming languages of the future?

My thoughts:

Massive code bases: There will be an API for almost any process imaginable,
Increased data hiding and modularity: You wont have to care about the implementation of all the different API's
Performance will be abysmal as compared to C: Computers are getting faster, people are staying the same speed, the code will focus more on ease for humans rather than computers.
Cross-platform: obviously
Hiding the mechanics of the computer: You wont have to worry about bytes and bits and buffer overflows. All the nitty gritty details of the computer will be abstracted away.
Informative, Heuristic based, error messages: The compiler is clever enough to figure out most common code errors, it wil give you a probable suggestion as to why errors occur.

Any thoughts?

 

[Hawk989s]

Perl > You

 

[zsouthboy]

Originally posted by: Shalmanese
Performance will be abysmal as compared to C: Computers are getting faster, people are staying the same speed, the code will focus more on ease for humans rather than computers.

Wrong... performance will still be there, it won't be ASM, but it'll at least be as fast as C++ based stuff... the reason being compiler optimizations..

The BIGGEST problems for this language you speak of will be implementing all those freaking APIs, coding a compiler to do all this and "error messages"...

 

[imgod2u]

Looked at Java lately? It's not exactly the perfect example of the language you mentioned but it's very close as far as following object-oriented concepts. It's also platform independent and performance can sometimes shy away from C++ using an optimized compilers. Of course, there are good Java VM's out there that can rival native binary in terms of performance.

 

[Shalmanese]

Yes, I was modelling a lot of it on java but, I still get the feeling that java isnt quite "there yet". What I am hoping is that any new language will be able to inhereit the "code-base" from previous languages through auto-conversion stuff so that you dont have to re-invent the stone for every new language developed.

 

[Buddha Bart]

When I look at clustering/beowulf, grid computing, and the upcoming multi-core and explicitly-parralell cpu architectures, I think that the programming language of the future will probably be one that incorperates an extremely parallel model even at the programmer level. Esentially a programming language that not only makes it easy to create multi-threaded apps, but one in which you almost have to. Actually, this could probably be mostly done today with new programming models and IDE's layed on top of the java threading implimentation.

Then once enough application(thread) level paralellism has been millked, it will be up to the compiler to further extract instruction level paralellism from the code. This is a relativly newly emerging field of compiler design that Intel, HP, and Sun are betting the farm on (transmeta too, but in there case its more like a cardboard box in an alley).

bart