What programming language will be most influential in five years from now?

Question

What programming language will be most influential in five years from now?

Answer 1

A Sequal to C# I'd say. Judging by the rapid development of .NET, C# will take a big share of the market and soon Microsoft will see that they need to release a cross-platform JIT, which will conqure the world.

Answer 2

Not sure about 5 years, but in 2 years I'm predicting Oslo. Oslo 2, perhaps?

Answer 3

C# for quantum computers.

Really,who knows? It'd be easy to predict that functional languages will make a strong comback, because multiple cores, parallelization, and virtualization will likely become more widespread.

But if I had that kind of clairvoyance, I'd be applying it to financial problems.

Answer 4

Judging from the growing expectations people have in Web applications, I would say Javascript.

Answer 5

In 5 years, the most influential language will still be C. Java, C++, and C# all are heavily influenced by C and will still be the major languages. If you want to know what language will be the most used, my crystal ball is less clear on that one.

Answer 6

These days I am having strange visions (wet dreams?) related to the subject of Oslo, the modelling language M and how to drive numerous things from models. I am not sure if it will and can take off, but if it does this could be a very exciting area that changes a number of things...

Answer 7

I think the better question would be what programming paradigm will be most influential five years from now.

Languages like Erlang are getting talked about more these days, and with LINQ and F# getting more popular every day, it seems like functional programming will be very hot in 5 years.

With the popularity of c-like syntax, it seems that people don't want to let that style go; so I see c# or something c-like with heavy use of functional constructs (like LINQ) in the not-to-distant future.

Answer 8

C++0x maybe, or a language that provides great scalability on concurrent programming.

Answer 9

I think that we'll see Python and Ruby become more and more popular. And I think that there will be another language that will take its place as the "hot new" language. Considering that Python's been around since 1991 and Ruby since the mid 1990s, I think it's likely already been released. What it will be is anybody's guess. Clojure? Arc? Boo? Groovy?

I also don't see Java, C#, or C++ going anywhere anytime soon. But they will drastically lose relevance unless they keep up with other languages (which C# seems to be doing a good job of).

Answer 10

I would say Python and D. Python is a conservative guess, because it's already on an upward trend and very well respected among people who don't need blazing fast performance or the ability to do low-level stuff. IMHO D is to C++ in many ways as Python is to Perl. The world needs an updated systems/performance programming language with modern features and the benefit of more collective experience, just as the world needed a scripting language with these characteristics. Both Perl and C++ are amazingly powerful, but amazingly crufty, bloated, outdated and difficult to use languages. Both Python and D are attempts to extract the best features from Perl and C++ respectively, while adding some modern features and the benefit of a few decades of collective experience. Both were started as hobby projects with grassroots following. Both are practical, multi-paradigm languages that avoid developing too much of a religion around them. The only difference is that D's ascendancy might be slower because systems languages tend to be used for longer-lived stuff in more conservative environments relative to scripting languages.

Answer 11

While I'm not sure what language will be hottest in 5 years, I can tell you what concept will be. Concurrency. Every modern computer has at least 2 cores, distributed computing is starting to become commercialized, cloud computing may become a source for offloading long running tasks (we've already got cloud storage, cloud application hosting, its only a matter of time).

Lots of languages are all ready struggling with, and dealing with, this issue. Several implementations exist at this point and it has yet to be seen which implementation(s) will become dominant.

Here's a great video featuring Anders Hejlsberg (C#) and Guy Steele (Java, and as the video states, Fortress) where they discuss the issues of concurrency and how they relate.

Answer 12

For sure in five years multicore processors will be a standard on most computers.

Microsoft is now investing a lot on parallel computing, cloud computing and also they are getting serious about F#, which I think it's a great language, that allows you to mix functional programming and object oriented programming concepts.

The future of C# looks also very promising.

Answer 13

Maybe a language that makes it possible to define non-nullable reference types. That would make life much easier.

Answer 14

http://www.wowwiki.com/Lua is what the kids are learning:)

Answer 15

Depends on the platform.

For backend business: Java

For web sites: Java or .NET

For mobile platforms: Objective-C or Java

For Desktop apps: C# or Flex

For startups: some new web language you haven't heard of and are probably not hip enough to "get" yet.

Answer 16

I think it's hard to define "Most influential".

I think we'll continue to see a diversification in the programming languages that are medium-widely used, while the ones currently very widely used in their respective sectors will continue to dominate.

So I think that the following will stay approximately where they are:

• Java
• C#
• C++
• C

And the following will gain more popularity but still not be particularly widely used

• Python
• Ruby
• Whatever the next python or ruby will be
• Functional programming (maybe) ? Haskell, Erlang etc?

At the expense of the largely deprecated?

• VB
• Pascal
• Cobol
• Objective-C ? Maybe?
• Delphi?

Answer 17

While I'm not sure what language will be hottest in 5 years, I can tell you what concept will be. Concurrency.

Ehh?

I guess there will be a lot of talking and not much coding.

If "we" (pick your favorite random company) want to remain backwards compatible with our $BIGNUM man-years of code base, we'll continue writing in $LANG, for some value of $LANG that uses threads and locks [maybe their behaviors are even defined... -.-].

Listen to a talk by Simon Peyton-Jones about Software Transactional Memory. I want. Not coming to $LANG by tomorrow. Without it, you'll have threading bugs or poor use of extra cores (beyond the first). Except if you have data parallelism. But... meh.

I just want my operating system to magically make my programs run faster ;-)

(Sorry to be a negative Nancy. Not directed at the quoted person, that merely prompted me)

Answer 18

SQL.

Okay, that's probably not what you were really asking.

Answer 19

Same as the last five years:

• Assembler: because it's not turtles all the way down
• C: because assembler isn't portable
• Java/C#: it's the new COBOL
• Python/Ruby: it's the new Perl
• JavaScript: it's what the web runs on
• LISP: those who don't know it are prone to reinvent it, badly
• C++: "I shall never die! The thought of me is forever, in the bleeding hearts of men, in their vanity and obsessions and lust! Nothing shall ever destroy me! Nothing!"

I don't think functional languages will gain major popularity - shame that this may be - but who knows, I'd be glad to be wrong on this one. And btw, I also wouldn't have anything against some further adoption of Lua - that would be the scripting language of my choice...

Answer 20

Clojure is coming up fast. Whether it will take off is still an open question.

Answer 21

Whilst it is difficult to say what language will be most influential 5 years from now, one language which looks very promising/interesting is Scala.

Scala is a multi-paradigm language (including object-oriented, functional, ...). It runs on the standard Java and .NET platforms and is developed with scalability in mind (hence the name).

Scala is developed at EPFL (led by Martin Odersky).

Answer 22

How about, in 5 years the most influencial language will be 5GL (AI)? where the average person wont need a developer to create an application for them! The average person should be able to organize and obtain desired results based on the natural spoken language we use everyday to interact with each other.