Where do you see the role of programming far in the future?

Question

I was just thinking about the possibilities of where the future may go for programming, looking back we have come along way from machine code to high level languages, any thoughts?

Answer 1

I have a fellow programmer that dreams of the day when machines will write the code and we can all "go home".

I personally don't think that day will ever come. I do think that we will continue to evolve our programming environments to allow us to do more with less complexity. Just as assembler went out when we moved to higher level languages, I see similar changes in the future.

What kind of changes? Well, I think that design tools will be used more and more to create code (this can already be done on some levels now). I know that a programmer looses some degree of control by doing this, but similar arguments were made by assembler programmers with the transition to Fortran.

I also think we will see a big movement toward Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The modularity and reuse of SOA software makes it a must as software gets more complex and bigger.

That is my $0.02 on the subject.

Vaccano

Answer 2

Excellent question! I've also thought a lot about this. Barring AI taking over the world, I think programming will move more toward the internet, more toward a community coding repository, and much more standardized.

A long time ago, if you wanted to display an open dialog box, you would have to code it from scratch. Now everyone uses the open dialog control that is already provided and works quite nicely. I foresee that trend increasing to the point where a developer writes very little code, and spends most of her/his time putting together controls and code that has already been written. A developer would open an internet repository of objects that are very generic and can easily snap into any project. They would search and find the ones they needed and snap them into the program. If they couldn’t find the right object to meet the task, they could create their own and submit it for other developers to use.

I foresee an internet browser that does a lot more than just parse HTML and run simple scripts. I realize that web applications can be very powerful, but they are often very complex and time consuming to create. An average web developer needs to know one or two server side languages, asp, php, jsp, asp.net. They probably need to know some flash. They need to connect and query databases using SQL, mySQL, or Oracle. They need to be a master at HTML, and a client script language like Java Script or VB Script. It would also pay to know some AJAX or Atlas, which requires knowledge of web services. That’s way too many technologies. I foresee a web application being written with one language, with a connection to a database server. The same language would be used for the client and the server side, and the programming language would decide how to split the code into client vs. server automatically.

Answer 3

As long as there are machines, someone will need to tell them what to do and how. This is the procedure called "programming". What will change is the level of detail needed and the language. Ultimately, we will be able to communicate in natural language (plain English/Chinese/Japanese/whatever humans will speak).

The main issue, though, is not to tell the machines how to do the job, but to figure out what this job is. As stated in Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month" and the "No Silver Bullet" paper, this main problem is a human issue, which will not go away any time soon. As we have better programming tools, this design part becomes the main work. And frankly, design is much more interesting - and difficult - than plain "programming".

Answer 4

Depending on where you live,The answer could be good or bad. I think programming in the US will continue to be outsourced to places like India and China. In my opinion, creative design is a little more stable at this point because of the required close interaction between companies and the designer.

Answer 5

Robots and AI is our next step in programming.