C, C++, Java, what is next and what will it look like?

Question

What do you think the next evolution of languages will look like?

Answer 1

You might assume C and C++ are being "phased out" and that Java/.Net/Python/whatever is an "advance" or the "next stop".

They are all used heavily (see the number C or C++ of tags on this site). The difference is that neither one is the lingua-franca of the programming world anymore. It used to be that the majority of apps were desktop or DOS apps on systems with very limited resources, furthermore all the major desktop APIs were written in C or C++. So everyone learned these.

Now its more complex. Languages are becomming more application specific. C/C++ for when performance is important. Scripting languages for when your main performance hit is db reads/writes. Java and .Net for generic, non-performance-critical desktop apps.

Its the same thing with computer or electrical engineering. In the past these were huge fields at the highest level of abstraction available. Now we have all sorts of higher levels of abstraction. Still, we need people to do this lower-level kind of engineering. They are still in demand. In the same manner, C will continue to be used in many environments, as will C++. You'd be crazy, for instance, to think that you could write a device driver in Java, you'd also be mildly crazy (but perhaps less so) to write a full fledged GUI app in C if you had the choice and ability to do it in Java or .Net.

Each tool has its purpose. I expect C, C++, and Java to evolve and continue to be used for new and legacy development.

Answer 2

Alan Kay once said "Actually I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."

He is working on changing the future of programming

"The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas." source

Well, I might add that Bjarne once said "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."

Answer 3

Languages evolve to fill a niche problem that is not covered by other languages.

Weather that language gets a foot hold and establishes itself is another question entirely and has a lot to do with popularity.

What comes next?
The problem I see that needs filling is multi-processors (or multi-cores). Currently all the popular languages have very limited ability to exploit the additional cores. Basically all current popular languages give the developer the very basic objects (threads/locks etc) to use the cores and then leave it up to the developer to try and exploit the parallelism available from multi-cores.

It would be a nice to have a language that abstracted away the concept of cores (even threads) and could automatically exploit the enherant parallelism available from multi-cores/multi-processor architecture. Unfortunately all these languages (that I know about) are still research projects at universities and are unlikely to see real adoption any time soon.

You imply that there was a progression C -> C++ -> Java.
That's a bit artificial, each language represents a method of solving problems and each language has inherent problem domains where it is efficient at solve a problem and other problem domains where that language would be a bad choice.

Personally:

1. I would never write a device driver with Java.
2. I would probably not write back-end web module with C (you probably can but not me) etc.

Answer 4

On the short term, I expect high level languages to become more powerful and more used. Perl 6 and Javascript 2.0 are good examples of what awaits us.

On the long term, functional languages might make it into the mainstream, but I expect that will not happen any time soon.

Answer 5

C# ? -- oh, but that is Java :) (sorry, couldn't resist)

The next generation of languages is already here, Scripting ones. Its no mistake that Microsoft is working on the DLR (dynamic language runtime). I think the future will be interpreted (but JITted), dynamic languages that have few constraints and lots of flexibility.

Performance constraints for the majority of languages are not so important nowadays, or no-one would be writing Java or C# apps at all, but considering CPUs are super-fast, and RAM is cheap, we don't notice the inefficiencies of these higher-level designs (eg if you have a 1mhz cpu, you write your code in C, not C#. If you have a CPU running at 3Ghz, you write it whatever you like)

So.. Ruby, Python, "Dynamic-C#"... these are the future. When MS releases the DLR, expect a lot of interest in it, expect a lot of companies to start talking about programmer productivity as the most important part of most application development.

After that.... probably a GUI-driven system where you connect blocks together in a UML-a-like system and add properties to them that produces generated code.

Answer 6

At some point programs will start writing their own programs making humans redundant as far as programming is concerned. The major disagreement is when this will happen.

Answer 7

I can't speak for C++ and Java, but C definitely ain't goin' nowhere...

It's pretty much unthinkable to write any kind of operating system kernel without most of it in C (well, you can use assembly language entirely if you are really stubborn :-P).

C is basically a thin wrapper of niceness around assembly language. It's so tightly coupled to a standard Von Neumann CPU architecture that no standard library or runtime is required to implement most of its features: pointers, character strings, automatic variables on the stack, integer arithmetic, etc.

For the same reasons, C is great for user-level applications that absolutely demand high performance, things like multiplying huge matrices or parsing complex languages. It may be a pain to write a parser in C, but the speed and efficiency advantages of manual memory management are hard to pass up...

Answer 8

As other have mentioned, languages tend to adapt around new technologies and trends. So in order to answer that question, you first have to look at the overall future of computers and see what languages are most suitable for these purposes.

For example, to use your language progression as an example, in the beginning (:-)) there was a need for a language that would make maximum use of the limited resources available, C fit the bill in that regard. As time went on, and the spectrum of software applications incresed there was a greater demand for OO based languages in order to facilitate software reuse, easier design etc. and C++ / Java became popular.

Currently, there is an increased drift in the industry towards server side components that do all the work with thin client UIs (i.e. browsers). So languages that cater for this demand are becomming more popular (Ruby, ASP/Java EE languages).

New languages will become popular when the technology that they are closest to become popular. Personally (and this is guesswork), I think there is huge scope for a language that truly takes advantage of multi-core systems. This will mean having multi-threading built from the very start and will probably require a change in approach and thinking (like going from procedural to OO).

Answer 9

If you follow only this branch of programming language history, I think one can write both JavaScript and C#, since they came after the three you mention, share a similar syntax, and took from the predecessors.

Others might mention D or Objective-C (they are already here, of course).

By next language, I suppose you mean "next successful", because there is almost a new language each month...
I think it will be a language with garbage collection, running on bytecode with Jit, highly portable.
I can't tell if it will be object-oriented or functional, with static or dynamic typing, but I would bet on a mix, like does the interesting Fan Programming Language.

Or maybe we are all wrong, it might just a natural language, with spoken or graphical interface: "Take the weather box of this page, change its color and this logo to that, and integrate in my page".

Answer 10

I believe the answer is twofold.

First, client side applications are more and more implemented as browser based applications. To give a browser based application a look and feel comparable to rich desktop application you need something like Javascript. And if you followed the news a bit you see a tremendous effort towards speeding up the javascript implementation in browsers, and a flourishing ecosystem of libraries which help you create a responsive, intuitive GUI with javascript in a browser.

So, for GUIs I believe the future is Javascript.

For the backend, the server, I very much doubt that the near future has a scripted language in store. Server-side software tends to live for years and years, features added, bugs fixed and all. The language in which that is written needs to be not so much fast to write, but easy to read (maintain).

And scripted languages tend to be a bit more difficult to understand if you revisit your code after a year or two to fix that bug. That has (in my opinion) two primary reasons which will not go away in the short term:

• IDEs have trouble giving hints with dynamic languages
• In the context your working there is by definition less context information available; in Java you know you can only get type X. In a scripted language you should check all referencing code, not easy in a large project

These problems can be mitigated by using very experienced developers, but if, in the future, the only kind of usefull developer is a experienced one we won't need to hire inexperienced ones, which will give trouble in the future.

For those reasons I believe the next-gen server-side language is statically typed. And from the statically typed languages I think C# and Java have the best chances due to the enormous amount of usefull libraries available and the very readable nature of those languages.

Answer 11

What would be great, in my opinion, is a language like C++ with a more compact definition, better standard library, native garbage collection, and native synchronization constructs. It should be usable by relative novices, but still provide facilities for experts to program in an efficient, low-level way when needed. I believe D meets most of these criteria, but it seems unlikely to me that it will take hold.

Answer 12

It's going on a couple years old now, but Tim Sweeney's The Next Mainstream Programming Language: A Game Developer's Perspective is an interesting cogitation on the subject.

Answer 13

What is the future of programming? Away from languages as we know them.

It's 2009 and we're still using text editors? With the project I'm a part of you can build entire applications simply by setting attributes. Outside of (mainly mathematical) expressions and string values, there's not a line of text anywhere.

One of the developers complained that "you can't print out the code," and I replied, "Would a company print out its entire accounting structure? Or would it print out the aspects it wants to see, such as Cashflow Statements and Balance Sheets?" It's only when we move out into new abstraction mechanisms that we can really move ahead.

The future of programming remains to be seen, but I think there are some exciting developments happening that will finally release us from the C/C++/Java harness we've had on for so long.

Answer 14

D language, especially the 2.0 version has learnt from Ruby, Python and lots of modern languages without keeping source compatibility with C, still allowing for raw access to the metal. The design decisions of this language are a perfect solution for next-generation system and general programming languages, with even functional programming and metaprogramming built-in.