The Hundred-Year Language
2 days ago
- Programming languages evolve like species, with evolutionary dead-ends such as Cobol and Java.
- The core of a language should have few, clean axioms that determine its long-term survival.
- Faster hardware will allow more wasteful but simpler designs, separating semantics from implementation.
- Bottom-up programming, with multiple layers, yields flexible and reusable software.
- Parallelism will be used sparingly, mainly for optimization, not as a pervasive feature.
- Open-source, hacker-driven languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby are shaping future language design.
- The ideal hundred-year language can be designed now, focusing on brevity and minimal effort in writing programs.