The programming language of the future: a philosophical question

Question

So after reading some of these posts and reflecting on the history of programming languages, I find myself wondering what the programming language of the future will be? As the human-computer interface evolves (touch interfaces, voice recognition, computer vision, etc) how will this influence the process of creating computer programs? Will programming become more graphical (e.g. flow charts, UML diagrams, etc)? Setting ego's aside, does it make sense for programming to be more graphical? Will we reach a point where we can essentially just sketch out a concept and let the compiler/interpreter handle the rest?
Perhaps this question is best left to Clark and Asimov, but they're dead. This leaves you guys.
(Moderator, I apologize in advance if this is out of scope for this forum.)
Last edited by bsilbaugh (2011-11-23 01:15:47)

Answer 1

geniuz wrote:I think the mistake of the scientist in question was not that he re-derived the Trapezoid Rule, but that he published it as if it was a new invention, while it existed and was already published in some form. That certainly could be prevented by reconciling to literature before publishing. In fact, I'd not even blame the scientist in question too much, rather the commission that approved his paper to be published in the first place.
Sure, he didn't publish the paper in isolation - but the peers who reviewed it would have been people from the same or a related profession. My point is that this kind of error results from splintering of the disciplines. You seem to think that the splintering should be somehow undone or reversed at the level of the peer reviewer or the publisher - but non-specialists (or specialists in other areas) will not be invited to comment, because it will be assumed that they lack the qualifications to do so.
geniuz wrote:Still, I think its a long stretch to compare the derivation of a Mathematical rule or method to the invention of a complete DSL.
I think I didn't make it clear where I was going with that. My point was that splintering of specialisations from each other permitted this duplication of effort to take place. I see DSLs as a way to splinter disciplines from each other. Thus, the rise of DSLs would make it easier for duplicate effort to take place.
geniuz wrote:The whole point of a DSL is that it allows experts in a specific domain to focus their efforts on creatively solving problems directly related to their field of expertise. When specific DSL's are integrated in university curricula world-wide, I hardly think there will be much duplicate effort going on.
Sorry, but this seems a little naive to me. I can see why you might think DSLs would permit specialists to more efficiently focus on solving their particular problems, and I don't entirely disagree, but even if it's true, I don't think it's controversial to think this will lead to considerably more duplicate effort.
geniuz wrote:Also, in the world of OSS, there are multiple tools that can perform the exact same job. Do you for instance consider the existence of both of the mail clients Mutt and Alpine as duplicate effort?
I haven't used Alpine, but if it's exactly like Mutt, then sure, I would certainly say that's duplicate effort. The more people who use one single piece of software, the more bugs can be filed against that software.
Also, I think this is a false analogy from the start. Mutt and Alpine are both written in C. If we're talking about the connection between duplicate effort and DSLs, let's consider the fact that "communicating and storing computational models of biological processes" (from the Wikipedia page on SBML) could be better done in Lisp, Lex/Yacc, or with the Lemon C++ library, instead of coming up with some new way of using harmful XML.
geniuz wrote:I still don't quite see how this can be interpreted as a necessary weakness or argument against more complex systems. Sure, DSLs can be dependent upon lower level languages, but if they are considered to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of certain experts, what exactly stops them from becoming dominant and continually evolving?
The fact that higher and higher levels of specialisation are concomitant with smaller and smaller user bases who still need to communicate with experts in other groups. I'm not saying DSLs should never be used. I just think they are essentially self-limiting, and just as bacteria will long outlive us more complicated life-forms, so too will the lower-level languages long outlive more cumbersome DSLs.
geniuz wrote:I wasn't implying computers will ever be able to mimic the human brain, and I'm not even sure whether it is something we necessarily want to strive for. All I was saying is that computers have already become indispensable tools in virtually every scientific and engineering discipline. They are computationally strong machines able to solve numerically involved problems at rates no human can ever hope to accomplish. It is this very aspect that will continue to guarantee the succes of computers, not AI per se. Again, I believe computers will never (at least not while I'm alive) be able to truly independently mimic and outperform the human brain, especially when it comes to aspects like creativity, i.e. the very aspects of human intelligence scientists have not even been able to understand and quantify to this date. Hence, humans will always remain "in the loop" to a large extent.
This all seems reasonable.
geniuz wrote:Don't forget that laws of physics are "laws" that have been defined and created by humankind for its own convenience. Even recently this year, practice has shown that a concept as fundamental as the speed of light might not be as accurate as it was so widely acknowledged by the scientific community. This however hasn't stopped mankind from using these fundamental "laws" to invent e.g. radio communication and electronic devices.
I don't think you're disagreeing with me. I'm aware of the fragile nature of what we call the laws of physics - but like you say, they're good enough that we can do things with them. It looks like our knowledge of the speed of light breaks down on really large length scales, and it looks like our knowledge of gravity breaks down on really small length scales, but the brain is in the middle. In between, our models for how the physical world works are very accurate, and it is in this regime that the brain operates.
Also, you should note that most scientists regard those neutrino test results as residing within the bounds of experimental error, and therefore not strongly indicative that the neutrinos really did break light speed.
geniuz wrote:I haven't said low-level languages will be abandoned completely, I think they will remain to serve their purpose as a base upon which higher level languages (like DSLs) are built. In that sense, I believe that the user base of these low level languages will become more limited to computer scientists, i.e. to the people responsible for "formulating suitable abstractions to design and model complex systems" (source).
Seems reasonable.
geniuz wrote:Having said that, I still don't see why it so farfetched that for the rest of the world, physically telling a computer what to do in their native tongue as opposed to typing it in some generic-text programming language, will become the de-facto standard. Hence, I will reformulate my statement by stating that programming as most people know it today will eventually become a redundant practice.
I don't think a friendly human interface should be considered the same as programming. This thread, if we recall the OP, is about programming languages of the future, not user interfaces of the future. I certainly agree that user interfaces will become more intelligent and attractive. I only disagree that this will have any strong impact on how we do programming.
Last edited by /dev/zero (2011-12-12 19:20:59)