The Hundred-Year Language Commentary

In the essay " The Hundred-Year Language", adapted from a 2003 keynote by Paul Graham, the hypothetical idea of a programming language that will be used 100 years from now (almost 85 years from now, actually) is discussed. Concepts such as programming languages evolving and some being left out, either for not being optimal or eventually phaing out, and one of them "evolving" into the language of the future.

The idea is interesting, given that it is true that over the years some languages have been abandoned in the dreaded realm only known as "legacy code", and yet I find it a little bit hard to see the future of computing moving in such direction. Graham hopes and reasons that computing power will be so powerful in the future, that programmers won't have to worry about algorithms that are fully optimized, since resources are so vast. However, I am not completely sure that we'll be using the same kind of computers in 100 (more like 85 since the keynote) years. I do believe that Moore's Law is at its last legs, and soon technology will be forced in another direction. Quantum computing has been and attractive alternative, but even before 2003 physicists and computer scientists thought we would have something more tangible in that area by now.

First image related to "quantum computing". As abstract and hard to picture as the real thing.

EIther way, and regardless of the slow advancement in such areas, I do believe programming as we use it and view it now will change drastically. It certainly should be if we hope to find a way to try and solve those NP problems, since it seems our current method is rather slow. The hundred year language might not even be what we understand and define today as a programming language to begin with, but it hasn't changed that much either in the 14 years from the keynote, so who can really tell? Lets just hope the language of the future isn't harder than making compilers.

Source:

Graham, P. 2003. "The Hundred-Year Language". Author. Retrieved January 28th from: http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html