What will programming look like in 2020? (2012)

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4655

by slbtty • 5 years ago

139 146 5 years ago

lambda-the-ultimate.org

adenozine• 5 years ago

Link seems busted for me...

Turing_Machine3• 5 years ago

Server has apparently fallen over. Wayback Machine link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210925211554/http://lambda-the...

P.S. these are predictions made in 2012 of what 2020 was going to be like.

Turing_Machine3• 5 years ago

No good deed goes unpunished.

Turing_Machine3• 5 years ago

I hope that made you feel good!

Seriously, someone goes to the trouble of finding the archive link because the server is having trouble (note that someone else had mentioned it too, not just me), and it gets modded down. Why? What possible justification is there for that?

Then even mentioning the ridiculous modding down gets modded down further. Why? (and no, "because those are the rules" isn't a reason... did it ever occur to you that sometimes rules are wrong?).

tardibear• 5 years ago

2012

dang2• 5 years ago

Added. Thanks!

Micoloth• 5 years ago

The “ Some safe and some bold predictions” comment is almost exactly my view on how programming should evolve. (functional, reactive, going toward dependent types etc ) Interesting how in 2012 it was already so clear!

I think mostly we do have gone in that direction, even if probably even slower than the (already cautious) commenter predicted.

Honest question: why are we as a community so slow at evolving a good, solid programming environment?

I get that each time a new language is introduced, porting over all the existing code + training the people is an immense task. But this is _exactly the problem_, right?

Why aren’t we able to stop for a while and sort out once and for all a solid framework for coding?

It’s not a theoretical ideal: I’m very convinced that the dumb piling up of technologies/languages/frameworks that we use now is significantly slowing down the _actual daily work_ we do of producing software. Definitely >>50% of my time as a programmer is spent on accidental complexity, that i know for sure.

It’s very practical: at this point this whole thing simply feels like very bad engineering, tbh?

dgb23• 5 years ago

There are many different types of programming. For example there is an increasing amount of people who program but do not have programming related job titles.

- A designer might use HTML/CSS/JS directly or with "low code" tools (AKA graphical IDEs, they are still essentially programming) to implement frontends or a bit of scripting to automate stuff in their Adobe tools.

- An analyst might use Excel (a programming environment) or SQL or some hybrid tool.

- Mathematicians and scientists are increasingly programming.

- An electrical technician or engineer programs their installations.

- And so on...

There isn't one paradigm or even a set of paradigms that fits them all. Some languages are deliberately straight forward and provide minimal abstractions, other languages have strong runtime guarantees, others enable flexible, composable abstractions.

I think programming will become even more diverse in the future.

tapas73• 5 years ago

My take on this:

1. Societal issues. Microsoft wanted Java they could control and change. C# it is then. Google is moving away from java to kotlin, because of disagreements with Oracle.

2. Wish of different trade offs. fast-to-learn vs feature-full vs ease-of-use vs configurability vs portability vs speed vs safety vs developer friendly vs user friendly vs admin friendly vs development-speed vs program corectness.

3. Low proof-of-concept cost. If some lib involves lot of boilerplate for my usecase, it is easy to create my own improved version and feel the sense of achievement (my version might be just a wrapper at first, but the gate have opened)

4. Reduction-of-programing-worlds-complexity is at the bottom of everybodies priority lists.

kaba04• 5 years ago

Google moving away from Java has nothing to do with Oracle. That lawsuit was about an old Sun license of Java that was thought to be hurt by Google.

Since then, Java was completely open-sourced, having the same license as the Linux kernel, so there is nothing stopping android from using it. The preference for kotlin comes from the fact that Android’s Java is barely at OpenJDK’s Java 8 versions, making syntactic sugars all that much more important there.

still_grokking12• 5 years ago

Google is moving away from java to kotlin, because of disagreements with Oracle.

Java and it's VM are OpenSource. So that argument doesn't make any sense.

Also I don't think Google would, or even could, move away form one of their primary languages.

Kotlin on the other hand is only a significant trend in Android development, and it will get dropped like a hot potato in favor of Dart as soon as Fuchsia arrives as Android successor, I guess.

Kotlin has a problem: It tries to be "the better Java", but Java is picking up (slowly) all the features. The space for a significantly more powerful JVM language is already taken by Scala. So in the long run there won't be much space for Kotlin left: As soon as Java will get "more modern Features" Kotlin will have a hard time to compete. As likely mostly only syntax differences will remain.

still_grokking12• 5 years ago

The “ Some safe and some bold predictions” comment is almost exactly my view on how programming should evolve. (functional, reactive, going toward dependent types etc ) Interesting how in 2012 it was already so clear!

Given that languages used broadly in the industry are lacking behind research 20+ years that's not a good prediction. It's just the way things are going.

BTW: There's still no mainstream language with full dependent typing… (I count Haskell as mainstream; Scala seems closest¹ but still a long way to go).

Actually people are already so overwhelmed by all that really old stuff coming now to languages that some of them resort to even much more basic approaches on the level of the 70'ies, like Go, thinking programming is otherwise "too complicated". To add on that: I don't think "the average dude" will ever use for example depended types even they would appear in some broader used language.

My guess for the future is more that we will see a kind of split between a big group of people using advanced low-code like tools for programming day to day things and data exploration, and some much smaller group of "experts" doing the "hard things" needed to make those tools work. On the one hand side this will bring programming further "to the masses". But on the other hand side the hard parts will not only remain, they will get even harder and much less approachable by arbitrary people.

¹ https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07653

qsort3• 5 years ago

Given that languages used broadly in the industry are lacking behind research 20+ years

This is obviously true in abstract, but the real breakthrough happens when you make those concepts ergonomic for the working developer. The theory behind dependent types is well established, but I can't really write my next project in Idris, can I?

Similarly, there was a time when C was the only sensible choice to write anything non-academic, non-toy. It's not like people didn't know about OOP or functional programming back then, but it wasn't a realistic possibility.

Or parametric subtype polymorphism, also known by its common name "generics". The concept has been around at least since the 70s, C++ templates weren't widely used before what, 1990?

My guess for the future is more that we will see a kind of split between a big group of people using advanced low-code like tools for programming day to day things

This has arguably already happened, we call them data scientists. Many of them are technical and have some light scripting skills but they couldn't be put to work on, say, your average backend project. Obviously this is a gross generalization, titles mean literally nothing, I'm pretty sure there exist data scientists that kick ass at coding.

skohan2• 5 years ago

Reactive is a mistake. It's a tool for a specific job, sure, but it's too big and opinionated of an abstraction to use it everywhere. The future of programming should be reality based.

Why aren’t we able to stop for a while and sort out once and for all a solid framework for coding?

There's never going to be one "solution" here. There will always be tradeoffs depending on the constraints of a given domain or problem space. One-size-fits-all solutions end up not being great for anything, since they have to make so many compromises.

Also great tools are made through solving real problems. If we just went to plato's heaven and dreamed up a "perfect" programming environment, we would end up with something which solves our problems in theory. But the issue with this is that our problems don't exist in theory, they exist in reality.

cortesoft• 5 years ago

One person predicted the AI IDE assistance. They were right that it is here, although I don’t think it is very accepted yet.

No one mentioned containers or anything related.

rpmisms• 5 years ago

I use tabnine every day, and it's phenomenal. It isn't Copilot, but it's good.

nomdep• 5 years ago

One comment does:

“I think you're right about virtualization, too. By 2020, hardware virtualization will be ubiquitous to the point that it's done for each application”

Macha2• 5 years ago

For a mere 8 year timeframe, the predictions seem rather poor. It feels like there was such a push among people to have the forward thinking ideas that they overestimated how much would change.

Looking back, the biggest changes between now and 2012 are:

* Git (and github) took over the world in the version control. Git was already the leader in 2012, but mercurial was doing ok and svn was still around to a much greater extent.

* Docker/Kubernetes and the container ecosystem. There was a guess here about app servers, but the poster seemed to thinking of PaaS platforms and Java app servers like Jetty more so. I guess you could say "serverless" is sort of in that vein, but it's far from the majority of use cases as the poster predicted.

* Functional programming ideas became mainstream, except in Go, which is a sort of reactionary back to basics language.

Overall though:

Good predictions:

* The IDE/editor space gets a shake up, though maybe not in the way any of the specific predictions guessed (the rise of VS code)

* Machine learning gets bigger

* Apple introduces a new language to replace Objective-C

* Some sort of middle ground to the dynamic/static divide (static languages have got local type inference, dynamic languages have got optional typing)

Bad predictions:

* No-code tools are still no further along mainstream adoption than 2012

* Various predictions that Lisp/ML/Haskell get more mainstream rather than just having their most accessible ideas cherry picked.

* A new development in version control displaces git

* DSLs, DSLs everywhere. DSLs for app development, DSLs for standard cross database NoSQL access,

Zababa• 5 years ago

Functional programming ideas became mainstream, except in Go, which is a sort of reactionary back to basics language.

I feel like there is also a return to basic imperative programming, with OO and functional where it makes sense.

Mikeb852• 5 years ago

Imperative programming will always be a thing as long as computer processors work the way they do (mutating and incrementing things).

humanrebar• 5 years ago

* No-code tools are still no further along mainstream adoption than 2012

In 200 years, people will still be predicting the rise of no code solutions.

If you are executing diagrams and schematics, you still have code. And the people maintaining that code are still coding. That is, they are coders. They're just working in a whole new stack that doesn't have git, diff, a variety of editors, open standards for encoding, etc.

User23• 5 years ago

There's no such thing as no-code, it's just a question of the properties of the coding scheme. For example C.S. Peirce proposed a turing-complete "no-code" graphical logic (aka programming) language[1] in the 19th century.

[1] http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/egtut.pdf

agumonkey• 5 years ago

true, it's mostly a matter of altitude on the abstraction ladder, and not dealing with textual notation (it's all graphs underneath anyway)

8note• 5 years ago

This is true, and there are also coders today who's code does not run on computers, but in people's heads as the implementation of diagrams and schematics.

Ericson2314• 5 years ago

I've given Go lots of shit, but once generics land and are widespread, I suspect it will undergo a culture shift.

qsort3• 5 years ago

I agree with your summary, but predictions are very hard (especially about the future).

Except for the perpetual no-code and DSL memes, whether git would dominate as much as it did was pretty much up in the air in 2012. Same with functional languages. In 2012 the mainstream was what, Java 1.6? ML/Haskell was like a breath of fresh air, it's hard to understate how pure OOP a la early Java sucks. The fact that some functional features would become mainstream wasn't a given back then, if anything, that is the surprising turn of events.

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 5 years ago

Rust in 2021 is basically the functional programming language this commenter was predicting:

I predict that functional programming will continue to gain ground as people discover the benefits of immutability and easy parallelismâ€”but the functional language will not be Haskell, nor Scala, nor Clojure. At a guess, people will use something with:
Strong tooling and libraries
An accessible type system
Deterministic memory behaviour
By-default strict evaluation
Commercial backing
Every mainstream functional language is lacking in at least one of these areas.

neutronicus2• 5 years ago

Rust is basically C++++ so I doubt it's what that commenter had in mind

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 5 years ago

One of replies to the comment was that C++11 was what the commenter wanted, whereupon the commenter mentioned ways it did not meet the criteria.

If you follow the C++ development, you can see a huge effort to make it support more funcational paradigms (see for example the efforts for structural pattern matching). However, its backward compatibility requirements have limited it a lot. So even if Rust was C++++ without the backward compatibility baggage it could easily reach these ideals.

zerr• 5 years ago

More like (C)++++ rather than (C++)++.

bregma• 5 years ago

Without a sequence point the result of that expression is undefined behaviour. Is that what you're trying to say about Rust?

nwomack• 5 years ago

Except that it’s not really “gaining ground”, all things considered Rust is not that popular.

tayo42• 5 years ago

It seems like its gotten some use lately. Isnt aws a big user of it now. Along with a handful of mid size tech companies?

Mikeb852• 5 years ago

But more and more people are using things built in Rust. Which is what I'd call gaining ground. Was playing around in Deno. Yes it's JS, but it was built in Rust. In some respects, that's the true test of a low-level language. Things built in it. C isn't popular. But you'd never say it's not popular because it's what everything is built on.

midwestemo• 5 years ago

What will programming look like in 2020?

It will be a complete shit.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4655#comment-73750

still_grokking12• 5 years ago

The reply made me smile:

  So...

  Nothing changed, then.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4655#comment-73758

dang2• 5 years ago

A couple small threads from back then:

What will programming look like in 2020? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4962694 - Dec 2012 (3 comments)

Ask HN: What will programming look like in 2020? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4931774 - Dec 2012 (12 comments)

FnControlOption• 5 years ago

Unit testing will be built directly into languages as an intrinsic part, like compiler optimization or GC.

Rust and Zig have this, right?

kolme• 5 years ago

And Clojure!

junon3• 5 years ago

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4655#comment-73772

... the beginnings of intelligent ... assistants in our IDEs ... specialize (sic) in ... C/C++, Java, Mobile. They will have intimate knowledge of common APIs ... trained on tens of thousands of code projects pulled from the open repositories across the web (google code, github, bitbucket,...). In addition to having 'read' more orders of magnitude more code then any human could in a lifetime, they will also have rudimentary ability to extract programmer intent, and organizational patterns from code. ... The computer automatically bringing up example code snippets, suggesting references to existing functionality that could be reused.

This person (Marc DeRosa) predicted Github Copilot within a margin of one year. Incredible.

chubot• 5 years ago

Leveraging the strengths of the computer and human will lead to an order of magnitude improvement in programmer productivity. Interactive testing will eliminate whole classes of logic bugs, making most non ui code correct by construction.

I'd like to see evidence / experience reports backing up this part. Certainly Copilot exists, but what I've read about it is pretty mixed.

kaba04• 5 years ago

More like Brooks was the one being right (for like 3 decades now) with his ‘No silver bullets article’, in that we will not have another order of magnitude productivity change in programming after high level languages became a thing.

Areading314• 5 years ago

Does anyone actually use Copilot day to day? How much time does it actually save?

davidpires• 5 years ago

Depends on the task, writing e2e tests using copilot it's amazing

solidr53• 5 years ago

Writing scrapers with it is also amazing. All from the puppeteer code, response interface and casting to a local class model. Very time saving indeed.

fermuch• 5 years ago

Writing boring chores or repetitive code is amazing. Need to handle all cases in a case in pretty much the same way but changing only one thing? Write the first one, the rest is auto coded perfectly.

byteface6• 5 years ago

I do every day. I code 5 times faster on problems several times harder.

You also get good at 'using copilot' just like you can be 'good at googling'. So if you not already doing it. Start now.

IMO. There's literally no point coding without it. You are completely wasting your time. However it has limits. It only helps you write code. Architecture is still down to you. If it could read your whole codebase rather than just the page you are on. And if you could supply it prompts via urls. i.e. preloads it with hints from other code bases. Then it will really become something else.

pps• 5 years ago

I do, it's helpful most of the time, mostly because it behaves like intelligent text expander, and couple of times a day I'm consciously aware how it helped me in even more "intelligent" way. There were also situations when it was distracting/confusing, but I can deal with it. I'm working as web dev, with TS, JS and PHP, and in my case there is no place for some great solutions that I wouldn't thought about myself (less than 5 times I've used something generated with comment), it's simply predicting what I want to do next in the line and instead of writing 50 chars to end that, I can hit tab. Honestly, I don't want to work without it anymore.

EDIT. regarding these situations when it doesn't predict what I wanted, I feel that my brain is getting better at not focusing at that and moving on. At first it was distracting, now I subconsciously know that the provided solution might be wrong and I'm deciding faster if it's something I should choose or skip. Your tool is adapting to you and you're adapting to your tool to find the right balance :)

ldjkfkdsjnv• 5 years ago

Its honestly not that hard to predict, with a bit of statistics and some insights into early deep learning, its obvious that alot of data with discernable patterns will produce good results.

sandwichbop• 5 years ago

What will programming look like in 2028?

lasc4r• 5 years ago

FYI, specialize is the American spelling.

junon3• 5 years ago

Yep, I'm an American. It was missing the 'D' on the end ("specialized") hence the (sic).

lelanthran• 5 years ago

Cherry picking only the accurate prediction makes it seem like the predictor is really good!

Look at the rest of that quote:

The human, computer pair, will also interactively suggest, confirm and fine tune specifications of mathematical properties and invariants at points in the the program.

That hasn't happened and as far as I am aware, is not even close.

This will help the computer assistant to not only better understand the program but also to to generate real time, verification test runs using SAT technology,

Ditto.

Interactive testing will eliminate whole classes of logic bugs, making most non ui code correct by construction.

Ditto..

So, 1 out of 4 predictions correct, which makes it worse than random chance?

CardenB• 5 years ago

Can you explain how this is worse than random chance?

still_grokking12• 5 years ago

Someone imagined an AI mathematician. What we've got is a parrot…

sourceless• 5 years ago

I don't know, some of that is at least starting to happen with Idris 2, though not in the exact way predicted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOtKD7ml0NU (Type Driven Development with Idris 2)

Short summary of linked video: when your type system is powerful enough you can restrict the set of possible implementations to the point that the compiler can make a decent guess as to what the program should be to satisfy the type signature.

zozbot2342• 5 years ago

That hasn't happened and as far as I am aware, is not even close.

Isn't that just the Rust borrow checker?

junon3• 5 years ago

Yes, if we're being pedantic then they were far off.

I was just pointing out something fun.

byteface6• 5 years ago

Well people were making API calls to stackoverflow at the time to pull the most popular answer based code comments. There were several Sublime plugins. So this wasn't so hard to imagine.

moogly• 5 years ago

People only seem to have heard about GitHub Copilot. But Microsoft has a similar solution (that is not as... invasive) that was first released in preview in 2018. It's called IntelliCode, available for multiple languages both for Visual Studio Code[1] and regular Visual Studio[2] (but not enabled by default last time I checked -- which was a while ago, granted).

JetBrains has their own experimental thing that is not enabled per default.

And there's also Codota and Tabnine.

Copilot is actually fairly late to the party here.

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VisualSt...

[2] https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/intellicode/blob/master/doc...

melling• 5 years ago

“HCI-ware (and wear)

While increasing heterogeneous and concurrent architectures will certainly impact languages and frameworks (and there is much progress there already, e.g. to leverage clouds or GPUs), I'm more interested in how things like Project Glass, LEAP motion, Emotiv, and TouchÃ© might impact programming. Project Glass could provide pervasive access to eye-cams, voice, and HUD feedback. Something like that would be a suitable basis for pen and paper programming, or card-based programming, or various alternatives that involve laying out objects in the real world and clarifying with voice (perhaps non-speech voice).”

still no progress on this. Keyboard and mouse.

Minority Report is almost 20 years old.

i had high hopes for Project Soli:

https://atap.google.com/soli/

Terr_• 5 years ago

Personally I feel that Minority-Report-y predictions are foolish, because is ignores the human aspect in the name of glitz. Specifically, how tiring it is to hold your arms in the air all day.

I think the example of mail is instructive. Contrary to some "zeerust"-y predictions, we don't buy virtual stamps from the virtual store to virtually lick them before virtually walking to the virtual mailbox. Even with the vastly improved capabilities of 30-40 years in 3D technology, the concept is immediately bizarre.

In practice, we instead boiled away most of the extra bits and ended up with e-mail, which tries to minimize even the body-movement needed.

hardwaregeek• 5 years ago

The App Servers prediction is actually a lot more accurate than I first thought:

You'll abstract most applications with a DSL, structured of applets or formlets operating on an abstract client API. The same app can then be 'compiled' and served to multiple mediums - as a web-page, an android app, a Chrome app, or even a desktop app.

This is effectively React with Electron, React Native, etc. Of course the author was overly optimistic about how polished and effective cross platform apps would be, but it's still the same idea. React is a UI DSL with a reactive runtime that can run on many different platforms.

daxfohl• 5 years ago

Nobody predicted GDPR or the need for multicloud.

Wonder what the big new grunt work for 2030 will be.

still_grokking12• 5 years ago

Well, GDPR is almost 1:1 identical to the regulations being in place "since forever" in Germany.

What actually changed is that it's now more enforceable. Before GDPR there where all those laws but nobody cared really as there weren't proper punishments in place.

My idea for 2030: We're going to tackle all that web-development legacy as we're going to leave the time-sharing mainframe model again (actually for the same reasons as last time… ;-)). But maybe I'm to optimistic, and it'll be 2040 by than.

zz865• 5 years ago

The reality is programming has taken a back seat while everyone spends all their time on containerization, k8s, cloud security and keeping up with what's hot right now.

Spinnaker_• 5 years ago

Off topic, but is there a new site that replaced lambda-the-ultimate? It's such an amazing source of PL discussion... but mainly from 10 years ago.

marcle• 5 years ago

+1. I was about to post an almost identical comment.

Cryptonic• 5 years ago

I read a lot of comments there, basically the devs back then did not know it, but they hoped for Docker and it's applications, for Rust, some for Node =)

quickthrower2• 5 years ago

Predictablyâ€¦’s prediction is basically Rust?

Shoetp• 5 years ago

At a guess, people will use something with: - Strong tooling and libraries - An accessible type system - Deterministic memory behaviour - By-default strict evaluation - Commercial backing Every mainstream functional language is lacking in at least one of these areas.

This user casually predicted Rust.

brabel• 5 years ago

Accessible type system? Hm, I would think this would be more about TypeScript than Rust.

still_grokking12• 5 years ago

I wouldn't call a "mutability first" language which relies mostly on side-effects "functional".

FridgeSeal2• 5 years ago

Rust’s type system is very close to Haskell’s and takes a lot of inspiration from functional programming.

I’m not sure I’d call Rust mutable-first either. As for side-effects, I suspect the next leap in PL development will be an efficient algebraic-effects system with a good dev experience (or at least a trade-off so appealing it overcomes the necessary friction).

chakkepolja3• 5 years ago

Strong tooling and libraries

* Long compile times * Too much micro libraries

An accessible type system

As a sibling comment mentioned, typescript covers this more appropriately.

- Deterministic memory behaviour - By-default strict evaluation

For most practical purposes, Golang and Java cover this. Rust / C++ is great is systems stuff, I am not going to use it for some application layer stuff, with all complexities that come with it.

Commercial backing

Not much, really.

jen202• 5 years ago

I find it pretty hilarious that “too much micro libraries” is a criticism, but then you recommend TypeScript - which runs on Node.is, the progenitor of “micro libraries” in the next sentence.

We’ll ignore every other bullet point containing fundamentally incorrect information also.

FridgeSeal2• 5 years ago

how the hardware will evolve: several (4-16) heterogeneous(not all with the same performance, some with specialized function unit) CPUs

Isn’t this basically the architecture of the Apple M1 chips? They’ve got efficient cores and high-power cores.

oflordal• 5 years ago

ARM big little (which the M1 is at least somewhat based on) was announced the year before the prediction.

blippage• 5 years ago

I had a play around with Logo the other day. In the end I decided to dive too deeply into it, but I came away thinking that there is basically nothing wrong with the language. It was invented in 1967. 1965! Yet it has everything "there". I think there's even a university professor who teaches Logo to undergraduates, too, claiming it is much better than Pascal.

Pascal. That could be used as a systems programming language. Maybe it's not perfect - C++ wins when it comes to resource management - but that doesn't mean it's unfixable. Just fix the bits you don't like. Sorted.

I could go on: Dylan, Ada, even Basic. They all "work". We've been inventing language after language after language, and yet all the key ideas were already there.

Now, it's true, many are lacking the kinds of libraries we want. And most of these languages don't receive the love they need to smooth over the rough edges that have programmers reaching for the more popular languages.

Let us now consider programming languages that can be programmed graphically. These kinds of tools get announced with great hype, only to be ignored when everyone realises that it's more fuss that it's worth.

And yet, it's maybe not a complete wash. NodeRed looked practical, and Scratch seemed to have a place. In principle, the whole idea that a program can be viewed as a schematic has appeal.

Then there's the "MX" tool for STM32 MCUs (microcontrollers). It can used to configure the pins and peripherals of your MCU. I hated it at first, but now I'm seeing its advantage at simplifying configuration, even if it does spew out a ton of stuff.

One thing about MX is that it "understands" the chip, so it knows about conflicts of pins and the limitations of the chip. The key thing here is that it's a metatool, a kind of Domain Specific "Language" (although it's actually graphical). It can achieve something that general-purpose languages can't. There's no magic here, of course, the MX only understands the chips because it has been programmed to.

MX is completely useless for making things like database applications, for example.

So DSLs /can/ work - maybe - but they tend to suffer from the same problems as graphical programming tools. They are also niche products, so they don't tend to get much interest. They also tend to suffer from the problem of "walled gardens" - whereby anticipated things are trivial, but unanticipated things are impossible.

One of my own ideas is a kind of "compilation language". It would be a language, possibly a subset of a larger language, in which you could give developers something that "understands" their problem domain. I'm thinking something along the lines of C++'s notion of "constexpr all the things". Perhaps we could push this idea so far that we could build a set of libraries that the compiler itself executes and can validate other developer code.

makapuf• 5 years ago

I also like MX bust only use it to handle constraints and find a suitable use of a chip resources. After I have all resources planned it's CMSIS all the way, not that complex.

pharmakom2• 5 years ago

Programming changes at human speed because it requires programmers to learn.

Maybe in 10 more years we will all be writing in ML-family languages!

plastman• 5 years ago

almost excusively javascript frameworks

CawCawCaw• 5 years ago

It is interesting to read some of these comments as an indication of what people actually hoped for, and then compare it to the reality of what they actually got.

What will programming look like in 2020? (2012)

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