What is the programming language of the future?

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Hello

I am going to school for computer science and am learning Ruby and Python on the side

What is the programming language of the future?

Of programing content for the web(in the future)?

Do you see any languages growing, merging, and dominating others?

If so, will one language becoming more common make careers in other languages obsolete?

I won't reply much to this thread because of my limited knowledge of where scripting is heading but I highly suspect that it has to be connected to web-content since the browser is the most used application. My reasoning may be wrong which I don't mind, I'm still learning. I just don't want to learn a language that will become outdated or less in 5 or 10 years... (is that naive?)

I'd guess one of the members of the C,C+,C++ family will be dominant, maybe java. I use R, so I'm not too worried about learning the latest language.

No single language can become dominant as languages are suited to different tasks.

Ultimate programing language... Plain speech.

If someone could create a compiler that used plain speech to formulate the program, it would instantly dominate the computing world.

No one programming language is every going to dominate computer programming. Some (for example C/C++) will most likely always be around, however even since I've started programming (14 years ago I think) languages have changed and evolved drastically.

If you want to learn a language for the web I would highly recommend javascript. It certainly has its problems but at the core of it all is a very powerful language. I would recommend reading some of Douglas Crockford's articles on javascript, he makes a pretty compelling case for the language.

In reality though, its hard to predict what the future of computer programming languages hold. If you are interested in the web though you can see at least a few years into the future by looking at the W3C standards and staying on top of what is being discussed.

Don't worry about a language becoming outdated, learning any language is beneficial. What you will realize one day is that all languages sort of fall into certain categories and syntax types and knowing several languages just makes it that much easier to learn a new one if you need to.

My CV reads like the history of computing with many languages on it that are now rarely used or obsolete. However, the important thing is being able to think in a logical manner and break problems down into logical units that are capable of being programmed. These principles generally translate from one language to the next, it is just a question of syntax. The largest change I encountered in my programming career was the switch from linear, top down programming techniques to event driven. Web development introduces extra complexities due to it being largely stateless - i.e. people can generally come and go at any URL. If parallel processing comes more to the fore, as seems likely, then that too will need a lot of rethinking by established programmers.

The relational database thing will fade into the past, rememberedchiefly for vastly overblown and overrun projects.

Information management will be focussed in an XML and XQuery layer not terribly far behind the browser. Thin will be everything.

Java will hang around, as a Swiss Army knife for tricky transformations. C will be with us for at least as long as the '86 architecture. Good statistical and visualisation languages still have a way to go before clear winners emerge.

IMHO the programming language of the future will be something that isn't written yet. It will make it easier to create programs and will likely be much more visual than semantic. It won't hit the market for several years, but when it does, it will be revolutionary. Like the Xerox PARC GUI was in the 70's and 80's. This new language will completely change modern computing. Bookmark this post.

It takes a while for a new language to become popular. There are some new ones I can think of that sound interesting, such as Go - the new language from Google, and Falcon - a language that combines OOP with functional programming and a new paradigm called tabular programming. Functional programming languages have become increasingly popular recently, and may very well be the wave of the future.

As for one language replacing all others, computer scientists have been trying to do that for years with no success, going all the way back to the 1960s with Algol 58. I don't think it's going to happen.

C/C++ and Java are already dominant. There's no "becoming" to speak of. Though Java has become increasingly popular with the rise of the Android and iPhone.

Visual languages have been in existence for many years, and no one uses them. Know why? Because for many purposes, typing is more efficient than clicking on boxes and dragging them. Graphics is not this magical end-all solution to every problem, like many people claim. If it was, then the command line would have died out decades ago, and yet many of the most popular apps (MySQL, NMap, etc.) are CLI-based. There's a reason for this.

I'm sorry, but the keyboard isn't going away. It's way more efficient than having to rely on hand-eye coordination all the time, and eventually you're going to have to learn to type.

Google++

Plain speech is too ambiguous. That is why we use mathematics to do physics.

ruveyn

Visualization in programming is mainly only useful for creating GUIs. How is visualization going to help in writing algorithms?

I would recommend learning languages of different styles, like some close-to-the-metal language like C, some more high-level dynamical language like Python, some functional language etc.
As with ordinary speech, having good ideas and thoughts is more important than being superfluent in one or two single languages. Different languages is good for expressing different ideas/ solving different problems.

Myself I'm looking into OpenCL, a derivative of C adapted for parallelized numerical programming on ordinary GPUs. In ten years another (or several) better language will most certainly be popular in parallel processing, but one will still have experience and style of thought needed for writing good parallellized algoritms. New syntax can be looked up in reference manuals.

It's probably naive, but not in the way you have in mind. It's also not a bad way to be naive; probably every coder has been here before.

So the thing about learning languages is that they're just tools. Fundamentally, a coder solves problems. Whether he ends up doing it with hammers, pliers, duct tape, Python, Perl, Haskell, Erlang or foul language depends on the circumstances.

Having exposure to many gives insights on how to solve the various technical problems that (a) people pay us to solve; and/or (b) make us ... excited [1].

In my personal opinion, a programming language goes obsolete for a given coder only when that language no longer provides unique insights in how to solve problems. Arguably, therefore, my knowledge of how to directly code the guts of an Apple2 (so 65C02 assembly; you won't find a modern desktop computer with one of these today) still provides reminders that help me solve computing problems.

[1] An example I point to of the coder mentality is Dave Taylor at id software, and what said about building the Linux Doom port on his own initiative: "I did this 'cause Linux gives me a woody. It doesn't generate revenue."