Skip to main content

A short comment on the future of programming languages

I've caught some recent articles and commentary asking a basic question of "What's next for programming langauges?" and I though I'd make a quick and short stab at a guess.

Considering a few elements to the soup that I think are key: the rise of dynamic languages and rapid development, the prevelence of the internet spreading word and use of multiple APIs and frameworks, and an increasing need for portability over a range of targets. I think this will lead to one inevitable move in software, but who makes it is anyone's guess.

We're going to see first one, and then many, dynamic, binary-compiled languages. We'll see things that allow two games to be written, one using Direct3D and one using OpenGL, and to compile them for the same target, using either. We'll see the ability for compilers to restructure the original code in such a way that library APIs will be more than calls to link to, but templates that will portray the intentions of the progarmmers and be able to adapt them to the target in question.

I call this "Hard Linked Libraries", but I'm sure a dozen names will surface. Python could make moves toward something like this, I'm sure. But my guess is that eventually something will surface in .Net to do things along these lines, probably using or extending generics.

I'll post more, and maybe some mockups. What do you think? Is this likely or feasable or stupid?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful...

Announcing Feet, a Python Runner

I've been working on a problem that's bugged me for about as long as I've used Python and I want to announce my stab at a solution, finally! I've been working on the problem of "How do i get this little thing I made to my friend so they can try it out?" Python is great. Python is especially a great language to get started in, when you don't know a lot about software development, and probably don't even know a lot about computers in general. Yes, Python has a lot of options for tackling some of these distribution problems for games and apps. Py2EXE was an early option, PyInstaller is very popular now, and PyOxide is an interesting recent entry. These can be great options, but they didn't fit the kind of use case and experience that made sense to me. I'd never really been about to put my finger on it, until earlier this year: Python needs LÖVE . LÖVE, also known as "Love 2D", is a game engine that makes it super easy to build ...