__future__

What is /prog/'s opinion on the future of programming?
-Will functional languages really take over?
-Are there any other paradigms rising out of obscurity?
-Will the hardware we run on change drastically? Would this affect how we program? Think quantum computers and shit (/tech/esqe, but entirely related to what we do)

I think that in the future the use of multi-paradigm languages will become almost standard when it comes to writing anything. Concurrent programming is the way of the future; it is currently the only way Moore's Law will continue to be followed. However there are elements of functional languages that make them difficult for practical use, so switching between and combining paradigms where necessary may be the way to go. However we will end up with most languages looking like C++, or worse; a mess of different ways of achieving the same goal (I still love me some C++).

As such I don't see a massive shift to functional languages taking place just yet, however I do think we will see the incorporation of functional features into OO and procedural languages. However I feel that the need for functional languages is inevitable; we are moving closer and closer to a world where we are having to concurrently use data from different sources at once and functional languages simplify this situation greatly.

I actually haven't learned a functional language yet, but am probably going to try pick up Haskell and F# later in the year. Most of the information I've got on the functional style comes from http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html

Given that all computers are Turing-complete, I don't think we'll make any changes to our actual programming style. High level languages will remain almost exactly the same, save maybe an idea or two. But I do think that the future of hardware could have a gigantic effect on cryptography. I haven't read much about this, but I am very interested in the effect it could have.

>>20
Message passing architectures and monads/agents only solve certain problems with parallelism. As someone has already stated elsewhere in the thread, there is no silver bullet.

Haskell does have a suitable number of abstractions in the     PVM extensions framework, but these are things that are not exclusive to Haskell.

In fact, you can easily build just as safe and easy to use library abstractions in C, C++, Java, or whatever and it's already been done.

I'm tired of people like you saying that only XYZ language can solve the problem of parallelism. Fact is, you can do it effectively in most languages. Stop peddling your lies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_skeleton#Frameworks_comparison

And that's by no means an exhaustive list, it doesn't include TBB and MPL, which are widely used among C++ programmers in real industry projects, and contains a modern and more complete set of such abstractions.