The Hundred-Year Language

This week articles is called "The Hundred-Year Language" written by Paul Graham and like the name of the article mentions it is about how programming languages are going to be like in a hundred years. First he does some expeculations if some of the current languages are going to have a dead end, like cobol. He deduces this by making an analogy in which the different programming languages grow in a tree type, this is some of them evolve in new ones and others simply ends. According to Graham Java is going to be one of those programming languages, although it may seem that Java is one of the most famous languages now a days, it may not have what it takes to pass to the next generation.

But why is it easy to predict how a language is going to be in a hundred years, this is because programming languages grow and evolve really slowly, against technology which is faster and have new gadgets every year, we still programming this tech with the same languages, and because of that we are waisting a lot of the power that this new technologies can bring.

He talks about parallel computing which a trend in the 1990's and was thought to be a new paradigm in programming but now a days even though we use it, it hasn't provide that revolution programmers were thinking.

In the past the ones that design the new programming languages were the academics, people that do research and based on that they develop, but now it is different, the ones that make improvements are the developers which actually use the language in practical purposes, an example for this are Pearl, Python and Ruby.

We can't actually now how a programming language will look like, because if we think about it we adapt them to the technology, but maybe with the advance we are having in quantum computing may be probable that we are heading that way.

If you are interested in reading this article, here's the link: The Hundred-Year Language.