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Where is programming going?

 
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I'm not exactly sure how to describe this, but it's kind of like Moore's Law applied to programming tasks. For instance, common programming tasks that used to be hand-coded migrate into APIs and frameworks over time. When I was first programming we had to implement our own sort routines on every new computer we used. Now of course, sorting a collection is built into every API. We could say that Hadoop is attempting to move big data accessing from "hand-rolled" to semi-automated, framework status. Ruby on Rails is similar, as are many other technologies.

So, perhaps one set of questions might be: What advanced programming chores are done by hand now that will be "APIed" in the near future? What "pattern or algorithm" approaches are commonly used within the walls of Google that mere mortal programmers will all be doing in the next few years?

In a lot of ways immersive game programmers might be ahead of this curve... How long will it be before going to Amazon will feel like being inside a 3d bookstore? Gamers already make alternate realities that are very compelling, but most programmers aren't skilled enough to work at Electronic Arts, for instance. But, in five years, we'll probably have frameworks and APIs that allow "mere mortal" programmers to start to create the kind of stuff that EA programmers are creating today.

What will those frameworks be? Can we define and categorize the advanced, perhaps proprietary programming tools of today that LOTS of programmers will be using in a few years?
 
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Parallelism? Mobility? Stuff we haven't even heard of yet?
 
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Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:Parallelism? Mobility?


I see proper parallelism support more of a language itself issue than an API. I agree that tons more parallel code is in our future, but don't know how we will get there. Java isn't going to cut it. I also expect to see a lot of split location solutions, where part of the code is in your smartphone, and part in the cloud, and the transfers are invisible.

We are in a tunnel, its long and dark. Mobility is the headlight of the train bearing down on us. Well, its really here now, but lets pretend we have a bit of time. We've got to think in new ways about how to interact with the users in this space. Its evolve or be eaten time.

There is stuff that drives me crazy that we have not fixed. Nearly 40 years ago, I was writing tools to make coding up CRUD screens (create, read, update, delete) for databases easy. Folks are still writing them. And none of them are much better than what we had 40 years ago. We haven't evolved at all in the concept.
 
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The people who are working on the Scala programming language are doing a lot of research into making parallel programming easier. Not long ago they won an European Research Grant to solve the "Popular Parallel Programming" challenge. One of the ways that this can be made easier is with actors - a higher-level way of dealing with concurrent processing than threads.
 
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Jesper de Jong wrote:The people who are working on the Scala programming language are doing a lot of research into making parallel programming easier.

Yes, they have designed the language to make it possible for mere mortals to do properly. That is why I am trying to use Scala in my next from-scratch project.
 
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Pat Farrell wrote:There is stuff that drives me crazy that we have not fixed. Nearly 40 years ago, I was writing tools to make coding up CRUD screens (create, read, update, delete) for databases easy. Folks are still writing them. And none of them are much better than what we had 40 years ago. We haven't evolved at all in the concept.



The problem with CRUD screens is that the way we interact with them keeps evolving. Especially with mobility in mind. Frameworks like Grails still make it cake to scaffold CRUD screens for domains together but there are still pieces of relationships that aren't that intuitive to a machine. So they always need to be tweaked. But the fact that I can do:



which gives me controller and views for managing a User (actual code, not shenanigan code) seems pretty darn good to me.
 
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Gregg Bolinger wrote:The problem with CRUD screens is that the way we interact with them keeps evolving.


For sure. 40 years ago, I wasn't building in touch screens for CRUD systems.

The standards of the UI details change, but the basic pattern hasn't changed a bit.
 
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Bob Reardon,
Your post was moved to a new topic.
 
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Bert Bates wrote:
In a lot of ways immersive game programmers might be ahead of this curve... How long will it be before going to Amazon will feel like being inside a 3d bookstore? Gamers already make alternate realities that are very compelling, but most programmers aren't skilled enough to work at Electronic Arts, for instance. But, in five years, we'll probably have frameworks and APIs that allow "mere mortal" programmers to start to create the kind of stuff that EA programmers are creating today.



I think we're already close to that. For example, Unity 3D. That's just one example. There are several similar products on the market. Not to mention all the existing game engines, physics engines, modeling engines, etc. I also think that platforms like Second Life and Minecraft weren't (or haven't been) taken to their full potential. A virtual environment where you can create your own virtual environments. What better place to build than in the world itself?
 
Jesper de Jong
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I've been hobbying with actors the past few days... MandelActors
 
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