Recent Trends In Programming?

[GWestphal]

What's new in the world of programming? I'm thinking along the lines of new general algorithms or cross language libraries.

If you had to catch up someone on the past 5 years and on what's coming in the next 2 or 3, what would you tell them about?

 

[DaveSimmons]

HTML5, CSS, AJAX / JSON, JavaScript (and JQuery) taking the place of Flash and Java.
Cloud-based servers and applications.
Android and iOS apps.
Rapid, incremental development methods replacing waterfall.

 

[N4g4rok]

I'm thinking along the lines of new general algorithms or cross language libraries

A few changes to .NET, i suppose. C# is a lot more prevalent.
ASP.NET seems to be getting up there too. Shares a lot of syntax with Java. F# is a scripting language from microsoft that's oddly adaptive and lets you decide on your own level of type checking. It isn't used very much, but it's certainly interesting.

 

[tfinch2]

HTML5, CSS, AJAX / JSON, JavaScript (and JQuery) taking the place of Flash and Java.
Cloud-based servers and applications.
Android and iOS apps.
Rapid, incremental development methods replacing waterfall.

Taking the place of Flash, but Java? I do not think Java has really lost too much steam on the server side. On the client side, applets were out much longer than 5 years ago.

Another trend I would say is the popularity of all of the JVM based languages (Groovy, Scala, etc.)

 

[BrightCandle]

Diversity. There are a lot more languages in the average project than before. Now to be competent on the web you need to program in about 10 different languages to get by on storage all the way to the front end. The list of APIs used is nothing short of astounding now as well, the complexity of apps has shot up but so has the amount of basic non functional reuse.

I don't really know where the language wars are going. Ruby certainly gained some traction but so did Scala and clojure. In my circles mass parallel programming is emerging and functional programming is finally starting to take off. But that is a very different world to the likes of C# or node js.

 

[Pia]

Polarization. On one hand there's a slow and steady ramp-up of people moving to higher-level languages and frameworks, for programmer productivity, and for major architecture changes like parallelization and offloading to the cloud. On the other hand, the higher level stuff gets paired with native code which is experiencing a comeback of sorts because of the emerging need for power efficiency, mobile computing, asymmetric computing and tapering off of processor speeds.

I find the combination of these approaches more appealing than stuff like Java and C# that can stretch to do a lot of the same things but doesn't excel in anything.

 

[Ancalagon44]

A move away from stored procedures and similar database APIs.

Now the business and data interaction logic is typically done in managed code using an ORM. Simplifies development in exchange for execution speed.

 

[clamum]

An interesting subject for sure but I agree with BrightCandle that there's a ton of languages/technologies to learn and that are used.

 

[DannyBoy]

node.js, it's everywhere now, you'll never escape.