future

Operating system features

Let's say, in a perfect world where everything is possible. What features would you like to have in your operating system, IDE, Compiler or computer in general. of course everybody wants reduced boot times and super faaaaaast processors, anything else? I personally really would like to have human language recognition. the question may ...

Frameworks simplify coding at the cost of speed and obfuscation of the OS. With the passing of Moore's law do you thing that there might be a shift away from Frameworks?

Frameworks simplify coding at the cost of speed and obfuscation of the OS. With the passing of Moore's law do you thing that there might be a shift away from Frameworks? I suspect that one of the reasons for Vista not being an outstanding success was that it ran much slower than XP, and, because computers had not improved as greatly i...

Where is the future of databases?

I'm a bit frustrated with my MySQL database at the moment, so I've been thinking about all the things I'd like to see in the database of the future. But I thought it would be fun to hear other people's thoughts too--I'm not a pro by any means. ...

What's the future of the web? XHTML 2, HTML 5, or something else?

I'm confused by the discussion and advancement both of a new version of HTML and a new version of XHTML. Are they competitors? If so, what is likeliest to be the adopted future of the web? If not, what is the differing non-competing purpose for each? Are we due to have a BluRay/HDVD battle here? Is there ultimately any clear decision? I...

C++ versus D

Is the D language a credible alternative to Java and C++? What will it take to become a credible alternative? Should I bother learning it? Does it deserve evangelizing? The main reason I ask is that with the new c++ standard (c++0x) almost here, its clear to me that the language has gone well past the point of no return with respect to ...

What features would you like to see in Java?

This is a pretty unoriginal question! Where do you stand on the Closures Proposal? What else would you want to see? For me it has to be a new decimal type which is really a BigDecimal but allows for standard math operations using +, -, x, / etc. ...

Stagnation as a computer scientist

Hello, Entering my fourth year of university, I feel that I've stagnated as a computer scientist. I'm a fairly decent programmer as is - I've taken an array of courses on algorithms, formal languages, formal logic and the like (as well as a ton of math), but I feel like I'm not learning anything anymore. I'm certainly much more enamored...

Confirmed features of .NET 4.0?

Does anyone know what will be in .NET 4.0? I found tuples on codeplex: .... // NOTE : this is a TEMPORARY and a very minimalistic implementation of Tuple'2, // as defined in http://devdiv/sites/docs/NetFX4/CLR/Specs/Base Class Libraries/Tuple Spec.docx // We will remove this after we move to v4 and Tuple is actually in there public st...

Does the D programming language have a future?

I stumbled several times over D and really asked myself why it isn't more popular. D is a systems programming language. Its focus is on combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. Special attention is given to the needs of quality assurance, document...

What is the practical use of "dynamic" variable in C# 4.0?

What is their use if when you call the method, it might not exist? Does that mean that you would be able to dynamically create a method on a dynamic object? What are the practical use of this? ...

Do you think that we as developers are worried about languages/tools than problem at hand?

I am a .NET developer now and have come from Foxpro/VB6/COM background. Over the time, I think we have changed to worry too much about languages/tools to do the work. If you look at what a developer in the .NET space would use, the list is ever growing. More so, the tools itself are so complex that - days are gone where you would find ...

Is Perl worth it?

Hello, My boss has decided to use Perl as our (preferably) single, main development language. For me, it just doesn't seem right. I'm asking on your opinion about it, as my feelings might be influenced by today's trends and the horrible syntax (coming from c/java background). For me, specifically, after Java, I was shocked about the la...

The Next-gen Databases

I'm learning traditional Relational Databases (with PostgreSQL) and doing some research I've come across some new types of databases. CouchDB, Drizzle, and Scalaris to name a few, what is going to be the next database technologies to deal with? ...

Is functional programming the next step towards natural-language programming?

This is my very first question so I am a bit nervous about it because I am not sure whether I get the meaning across well enough. Anyhow, here we go.... Whenever new milestones in programming have been reached it seems they always have had one goal in common: to make it easier for programmers, well, to program. Machine language, opcode...

What optimizations today are going to be useless tomorrow?

I hope we all know by now that Premature optimization is the root of all evil. One side of that quote means by optimizing you are increasing complexity and complexity is evil. The other less known side is today's optimization might be meaningless tomorrow. What I mean is we used to think that, "Floating-point operations are slow, ther...

Will the accessibility of supercomputers change software engineering?

After reading this Computer World article, I've found some supercomputers that I readily available for less than $10000US. To me, that's a huge shock. However, I'm curious as to how this will impact software engineering and computer science, especially in the design and construction of applications. ...

Quantum Computing - Hype Or Hyper?

I have recently been web-researching quantum computing. Will we see these in our lifetimes (ever?) (The error correction issue, for example, seems intractable to me). ...

Language Design: More or less flexible in the future

There seems to be a fundamental split among programmers on how new general-purpose languages should be designed. In one camp you have those who think new languages should be more disciplined, stricter, simpler, etc. than old ones and should focus on making it harder to shoot yourself in the foot, even if this means giving up some expres...

Virtual machines of the future

I'm looking for some resources regarding the virtual machines of the future (Like jvm or clr) What are they going to look like? Will they provide a concurrent runtime, more powerful metaprogramming models? I'm looking for articles, research projects, or pure speculation, anything that is going to be an interesting read. So if you have...

Parallel programming course or classification and prediction course?

Well I can't decide if I should take the "Parallel Programming and Architectures" course, or the "Algorithms for Classification and Prediction" course ... so I figured I'd ask my very first StackOverFlow question ;) Really, I'm curious about parallel programming vs machine learning ... they're both very interesting areas. How much par...