Your predictions on Languages evolution

Question

Well, I know it's not all about speed and memory usage.

But I would like to know what you think will happen to most of the high-level programming languages. As far as I know, Java is much faster than it was in the past, what about python, php etc.

Answer 1

Speed has more to with Moore's law than the language itself. So if you are looking in absolute terms, you'll get more bangs for more buck by just upgrading your machine on a regular basis.

In terms of memory footprint, I expect most languages to continue gathering functionality thus increasing their footprint.

Answer 2

High level programming languages will continue to get more abstractions that make it easier for developers to specificy what they want a computer to do, without having to get their hands dirty with difficult underlying details that a compiler and/or runtime system is better at optimizing anyway than any developer might be able to do a priori.

Think about:

• support for multi-threaded execution (like Parallel Extentions in latest .NET)
• specifying structure and functional outcome instead of manually telling computer exactly how and in what order to shuffle which sets of bits around

Those kinds of things.

Answer 3

Parallelism, given that increasing the number of processing units (cores) is the principal way of gaining speed nowadays. To make it manageable to humans, software transactional memory seems to be one of the most promising real-world solutions.