The Future of Programming: Less Is More
eWeek (08/28/06) Taft, Daryl K.
The rise of open source has shifted the face of programming toward a more dynamic framework that will be less encumbered by configuration concerns and proprietary infrastructures, some developers say. The grassroots community-development model produces simplified code that could bring the age of the vendor-created enterprise code to an end. XML will be the core data type for languages and databases by 2010, said Borland Software's David Intersimone, adding that future languages will be able to verify correctness and testing with syntax extensions. Artifact management, testing, audits, and refactoring will all be automatic in the development environment of the future, Intersimone says. By 2010, he predicts, there will be Web services and libraries of reusable, distributed objects available for developers. The platform of the future should enable developers to extend an existing language, but also simplify the process of creating a new language with an intelligent editor for it, according to JetBrains CEO Sergey Dmitriev. "To run platforms written in such a DSL [domain specific language], the platform should support writing generators to any existing runtime platform--Java or .Net or whatever," he said. "Using such specialized DSLs allows writing programs on a much higher level, so these programs will be much more maintainable and expressive." Dmitriev terms this approach language-oriented programming, and expects future languages to offer more expressive knowledge representations. Programming needs to become creative again, Dmitriev says, which will require better tools. An understanding of new programming skills, particularly service-oriented architecture for business, will be increasingly important, says JackBe CTP John Crupi. "In the future, Web-based applications will subscribe to business events and be mostly based on this interaction model. This new Web event model requires programmers to program at the business event level and less at the user event level."
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