The Hundred Year Language

The Hundred Year Language

Technology is always evolving. We are continuously developing new software and hardware, with the goal of making it each time faster and more efficient. On his speech during PyCon 2003, Paul Graham talks about the future of programming languages.

I have never give it the thought of the future of programming languages. It is true that each 18 months technology's speed doubles, as the Moore's law state. However I found it reasonable that this phenomenom cannot keep on forever. There must be a natural limit to this growth, as Paul said. And as technology gets faster, that means that languages can become more simple to use to program. As they become more powerful, programmers each time have a smaller need to compact everything and use complex algorithms to make more efficient code for a computer to be able to process it given its current limits of memory and cpu power. 

 As I read through this essay, my most important thoughts were on imagining whether if optimization algorithms would play such an important role in the future of programming, or must it be the languages themselves the ones that, as the author suggested, will have to adapt and evolve, surviving and merging with other languages in the search to create a more complex and compatible one that will be able to work in the advanced and faster computers in the future.

It is amazing to think that probably we already have developed the "hundred year language", a language that is adaptable enough to adopt elements from other languages to keep active. As other languages will very likely dissappear (like Java), I do agree with the principle that we should focus on analyzing the properties of our modern programming languages in order to prevail the major ones.

One thing is for sure, I believe parallel programming is going to be a key in the future of programmig, and it will allow us to reach new levels of speed and efficiency in a hundred years.