

Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling (2000) - ingve
http://www.gotw.ca/publications/c_family_interview.htm

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siavosh
"It just feels like there's so much territory out there that's beyond the
bounds of ASCII text that's just line after line, roughly 80 characters wide,
mostly 7-bit ASCII, something that you could type in on a teletype. That's
still where programming basically is these days, and it's proven to be a very
hard thing to get anything beyond that."

Few things in programming are as stupefying and obvious as to why we all
essentially still use glorified text editors to do "high-end" programming. I
wonder if in a 100 years programmers will still be editing text. I'd like to
think there's a paradigm shift out there but no one's found it yet.

~~~
vbezhenar
Paradigm shift will occur, when we will deploy neuromechanisms allowing to
directly interact with the brain. Pictures are more natural representation for
our mind, so we probably will live in some super-unicode environment. No need
to stick with ASCII, no need to encode "while" operator with those 5 latin
letters, just some fun picture and that's all. Or may be block schemas will
live again or modified block schemas. They are difficult to use with current
input methods. Even with mouse it takes a lot of time to scroll and zoom big
picture. And with neurointerface, when computer will show you exactly what you
want in exactly millisecond you though about it, block schemas might be just
perfect representation for imperative programming language. Classes might be
represented in some kind of UML diagram or another similar approach.

That would be really fun time to program.

~~~
siavosh
The futurist in me thinks the following: in a 100 years programs will program
themselves. We'll just need a reliable way to tell them what to program.

~~~
phpnode
Great news, The Future is here already! These reliable methods for telling
computers what to compute are known as Programming Languages.

~~~
siavosh
The closest paradigm to what I was trying to imply are more general purpose
declarative languages. Something like sql or rich logic libraries that let the
developer describe the desired result rather than the 'how.' Now advance this
by 100 years, and I would hope anyone can program arbitrarily complex things
by using graphical/natural-language tools to specify constraints, and then the
'program' arbitrarily generates the lower-level code.

~~~
pekk
So the future is Prolog?

~~~
DonaldFisk
It may be from the early 1970s, but compared to the mainstream programming
languages of today, it still look pretty futuristic to me.

~~~
MichaelGG
Aren't most things from the 70s? Did we get any serious new language tech
since then? Tooling got nicer, runtimes faster - but the language
breakthroughs?

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gp7
> Stroustrup: Without supporting libraries, most serous applications are
> unnecessarily hard in C++.

Indeed.

------
w0000t
I also wish C++ had a large Standard library. Including <vector>, just works,
you don't even have to think about it. Now imagine doing the same for <sound>
or <window>.

~~~
67726e
They have that. It's called Java.

