What are the most cool and modern programming areas nowadays?

Question

In preparation for a blog post about programming, I'm gathering ideas around areas of programming and software development that are actual, new, fresh, cool, interesting and are potentially profitable in the near future.

I've gathered these ideas:

• apps for Facebook and Twitter
• apps for other API based websites (social apps)
• cell phones, Pocket PC applications
• robots and automation
• web tool applications for other programmers
• multilingual websites and web tools

Do you know other issues/trends that can be added to this list?

Answer 1

Cloud computing and apps that utilize it effectively.

Answer 2

All areas of programming are, or could be interesting. But this doesn't really answer your question :)

Well, mashups are cool.

Answer 3

Here is my top 10 list of what is funky, cool, happening and grooooovy:

1. In at 1, Concurrency, scalability and distributed data implementations
2. In at 2, Programming Languages and Meta-Object structures
3. In at 3, Image analysis and automated environment interpretation
4. In at 4, AI and NLP combinations in Search technologies
5. In at 5, Self-replicating automata and swarm intelligence
6. In at 6, Human/Machine hardware interfaces (wetware)
7. In at 7, Nano-robotics in medicine
8. In at 8, Medical/Life Simulation (think simulating a virus that attacks cancer)
9. In at 9, Real-time Raytraced graphics
10. In at 10, Automated Social Interaction/experimentation using online communities

I feel it might be balanced to add a few Empty hype items that have potential, but so far are pretty lame/boring from a technical perspective ... but with some thought could get interesting:

1. Location Based Services
2. Google Wave ... isn't this just very rich, relational email? I take this back, I watched the developer video thingy. Now i'm hyped :P
3. Wikis ... Blank canvas, not much going on. How dry is wikipedia ;P
4. Payment/virtual currency. Too much freeconomy going on online.
5. Secondlife/MM-style games - Interesting tech, no juice
6. Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX - A single open solution might be nice.
7. Google Chrome OS - Doing away with X11! Sounds like Microsoft's embrace-extend-extinguish game plan to me

Note: Facebook, Google and Twitter do not appear in the list. They are API

Answer 4

Technologies supporting cloud computing reliability, security and scalability

Answer 5

Visual programming through tools like Processing, "an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions."

Answer 6

My programming interest in technology are Mashups, Web 2.0, .Net 3.5, parallel programming. However, learning algorithms are also interesting, I'm interested on evolutionary learning such as genetic algorithm and ant colony. I think, modern technologies and learning algorithms would be a good combination.

Answer 7

Metaprogramming is also pretty cool. Code analysis (FxCop, StyleCop, NDepend, ...) and modifying existing assemblies (ILMerge, Mono Linker, ...).

Answer 8

Telecommunications area in general. And particularly environments/programming languages supporting it (Erlang for example).

Answer 9

Mobile device development such as iPhone, Palm Pre, Android programming seem be reasonably hot at the moment.

Answer 10

Using the tremendous power of GPU for non-graphics-relateted calculations. See nVidia CUDA to get an idea. This is pretty new right now so it's only gathering momentum, but I expect that it will see more widespread use in the coming decade.

Answer 11

Physical computing / ubicomp, especially Arduino and similar ways that these concepts can be popularised. (See this piece comparing its significance to that of the Altair 8800).

Answer 12

What are the most cool and modern programming areas nowadays?

Robotics.

Answer 13

As always, Fortran.