Why the next 5 years will be about languages

with Ted Neward

Definitions

• HST - hooking sh*t together

What's the next big thing?

• We did OO, managed languages, what next?
• languages

Historic language split

• Practitioners versus Academics
• need to work together, historically don't
• academics don't take ideas to completion
• both have their own agendas and they differ

Lines of assembly per line of code

• JAVA/C# about 12
• PowerBuilder about -2
• LISP on the other hand is in the thousands

Perfect Storm

• Vistualization - CLR/JVM
• Language toold
• Antler - parser generator
• Pheonix toolkit - back end processing tool kit
• Linguistic Focus
• mop - at any poitn I can change my code at run time
• AspectJ - AOP for Java
• Things will migrate from academics into mainstream
• DSLs
• Excel is a DSL

The Big Problems

• Concurrency
• Actors model?
• Security
• OO drawbacks
• Distribution
• Allow users to extend beyond your intent
• Better UI design appraoch

Books and Articles

• Structure and Ideas of CP
• The Free lunch is over

Notes

• Every programmer has about the same number of lines of code in them per day
• You should know one level below where you're working (CLR for us)
• We want tools that help us focus on the problem
• How do we design a language that allows the business experts to "code" the business logic
• Remember that Code is data