future of programming

I’ve been reading some interviews recently (Coders at Work) and one interviewee (I can’t remember who, but I think it was Fran Allen) suggested that in the last 20 years programming languages have not progressed leaps and bounds as they appeared to in the early days. Are they right?

Personally, I think this might be a good call. How different are the currently programming languages from C? OK, today’s popular duo, Java and C#, have garbage collection and thus we don’t have to deal with those troublesome pointers. Then again, both LISP and Smalltalk have had garbage collection for a long long time. C# has lambda expressions, and other higher-level functions, but then again this stuff was around in LISP since day dot. It’s almost as if the “C-style” languages are battling to catch up with things like LISP – which is a language I’ve never used other than for some emacs hacking. However, LISP has been around since 1959, so why has it taken so long for people to realise that many of its features are incredibly useful? Have we been held back by the fact that most academics don’t really care too much about this kind of stuff, and so don’t push it, and industry is too busy telling us something needs to be done last week?

First, I know that there are academics who do care about this stuff but I don’t think there are enough. And by virtue of being an academic, they are not exposed to many of the problems that are faced by your every-day software developer, and as such, maybe they don’t see the future so well. Thus is it up to industry to innovate at this level? If it is, I don’t see us moving too far forward from our current situation in the next few years. Why?

Well, most small to medium sized software houses are not exactly making money in significantly large quantities to warrant throwing it away on research that some other company making similar software will use to create a similar/better product. So instead of spending money pushing forward the state of the art, you would be insane not to spend that money on making a better product. This combined with crazy schedules, does not leave much in the way of time for forward thinking.

So it appears that we need to rest our hopes on the large enterprises like Microsoft, Google, et al. It’s fair to say that these companies invest a significant amount on money in research, some of which goes toward trying to make programming languages better (F# and Go for example). However taking these two languages as examples we see that F# doesn’t appear to push that many boundaries, and I can’t comment too much on Go, as I’ve not looked at it closely, but it also doesn’t seem to include too many radical switches. Maybe radical does not sit well with shareholders, I dunno.

The thing is, I’m not professing to contain much insight on this either, and I’m not even sure I know what I mean by a radical switch. I just know it doesn’t appear that academia or industry are moving this forward quick enough – if the last 20 years is anything to go by. The only remaining vehicle for change is the programming “community” as a whole, but how much traction we can have is debatable. That said, we do need to move in a different direction, I’m sure of that, and maybe things like multi-core processors may force us kicking and screaming in that new direction. However maybe the problem is even deeper than this, and a switch away from the whole Von Neumann architecture is required. Who knows? Well, I hope someone does!

Back in ancient times and right up until relatively recently (mid 1400s) scribes were used to copy important documents for kings, queens and other nobility. It’s hard to imagine that most people couldn’t write back then, and I suspect (but can’t find any hard facts) that many many people still had difficulties writing until the beginning of the 1900s.

However, the job of a scribe became almost redundant overnight with the invention of moveable type. At this point we began to see a power shift, as documents were easily copied and translated, and distributed to the masses. Obviously there was still the hurdle of learning to read, but now many important documents were available to more than just a handful of people – prior to this reading such documents was limited to the nobility and the clergy.

Moveable type was the most popular form of distributing documents and information right up to the modern day. However, with the advent of computers and the internet, this has changed for good.

Today we find less and less people reading books, but instead we mindfully overdose ourselves on blogs and social networking sites. This information exchange only serves to benefit each and every one of us, as now we can observe opinions that are not dependent on the views of an editor whom we share little to nothing in common.

It’s easy to see how jobs have transformed over the centuries, once coveted jobs are now in the hands of “amateurs”; who to their credit provide content that is more pertinent to the interested party. So where does this leave us as software developers? How will our roles stand up with the future in mind?

If we think back to what I said earlier, about how not too long ago most people couldn’t even write, and consider that the computer was out of reach, both financially and physically, of most people, but now both these things are the norm in society. So just as everyone learned to write, is everyone going to learn to program?

OK, you may be thinking that a field like mathematics has been around a long long time, and that not everyone is competent in even basic mathematics. However, let’s face facts, a general programming task is nowhere near a difficult as even high-school level mathematics. That’s not to say there does not exist difficult computing tasks; in fact I’m hoping to convince you of the opposite.

Is it that crazy to think that one day people will program a computer in the same vein as we read and write English (insert your native tongue here)? I don’t think so. Programming is not really that difficult (doing it well is as difficult as writing beautifully in English, and that has never stoped people writing, look at me). Just as blogs and the internet pulled down the barrier for each and every one of us to write and be heard, I feel it’s only a matter of time before programming computers becomes something more akin to what many will do in everyday life.

If we look closely the first steps are underway. People are using HTML, CSS and JavaScript as if they were everyday things. They may be doing them under the veil of certain tools, but the “non-programmers” are programming. They may not even know they are doing it, and the ability to make more complex applications is only going to get easier.

For example, consider writing a database application for an online bicycle shop using CakePHP (something I have experience of, hence the inclusion). You have to know almost nothing about using a database to create this application. OK, you may say that scaling and optimising these things takes a “professional”, but at the rate we are pushing the technology, this barrier may not be there on 5-10 years time – consider the cloud computing environments as a step in this direction.

What I’m not saying here is that all computing is easy. There are still problems that are difficult to solve and require much much more than simply following a fixed set of instructions. Indeed, this is the domain where us developers must start focusing.

There may be many readers out there that think this is all nonsense and that programming computers is always going to be an elite occupation. Just tell that to the scribes, journalists and the media presenters/organisations, whose occupations have either vanished or are suffering severe contraction. Many of these occupations never seen it coming (or refused to see it coming) and done nothing – but just remember how quick this actually happened to each group. Do you want to be in the same position?

academics don’t care and industry doesn’t have the time

the future of the humble programmer