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Languages that won, win, and will win are all of those that are moving towards being smart, in the sense that the compilers/transpilers infer what the programme

Languages that won, win, and will win are all of those that are moving towards being smart, in the sense that the compilers/transpilers infer what the programmer is trying to do and generate the appropriate code under the hood. The future of programming is describing the majority of programs in something thats even closer to English, and then fine tuning it with something like python, all of which will result in natively compiled optimal binary.

AlotOfReading 3y ago
People have been making similar predictions longer than either of us has been alive. Remember Cobol? Basically that. 5th generation languages? Same thing, with a different definition of "describe". Ultimately, those all turned out to be dead ends while the "antiquated" languages kept improving and innovating, albeit usually by (re-)inventing things that already existed elsewhere.
- ActorNightly 3y ago
  You are mistaking syntax for features. C++ got popular because it managed data structures under the hood automatically. I.e, you didn't have to keep track of memory offsets or function pointers. Java got popular because it did that and also managed memory allocation under the hood automatically. Python (and Javascript) got popular because it did all of that and also managed types under the hood automatically. The future is exactly this. Some language (or Python 5 or 6) is going to do all that except manage common processing algorithms for you automatically. For example, you will not need to import a library to convert xml to json, the .toJson call will be put through an AI inference algorithm that will essentially generate the required code for you on the fly, and more then that, it will do it in a much optimal way because it will recognize that the xml data follows a particular structure so it can optimize the search of the tags rather than doing a generic approach.
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    The discussion isn't about C vs Python, it's about why Python won over Ruby, a language at a similar level of abstraction. Ruby is arguably even less burdensome because in many cases the libraries/frameworks do a lot of magic that would be unpythonic.
    - ActorNightly 3y ago
      Ruby has a lot more idiosyncracies, especially with cross platform stuff. Like I said, the more the language does for you, the more its going to "win".
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      AFAICT, Python won over Ruby because the support was largely in English, not Japanese, and because English is the language of global science and commerce and Japanese is the language of…Japan. Boosted by Python having a much better experience on the most common desktop environment (even though Python also favored Linux and, IIRC, other Unix-ish environments); Ruby experience on Windows eventually got tolerable, but even now that’s largely because there is a third-party project providing the main Ruby-on-Windows installer. The overwhelming advantage in ecosystem breadth and depth it had for this reason was insurmountable, even once Rails drew more attention to Ruby. There’s a whole bunch of technical advantages and disadvantages of each when you look at the language and core implementations, but I don’t think they were really the factors that led to the different relative popularity of the two.
  - Mawr 3y ago
    Javascript got popular because it was the only option to program for the web. That's it. Python and other dynamic languages don't "automatically manage types", they just let you not write the types down in the code. The types still exist and need to be managed by the programmer. There's zero cognitive load improvement there. As for the AI stuff, lol. I see no point discussing concepts so far out of reach they're in the realm of sci-fi. What you're describing is just magic compared to what we can do in 2023. We already have languages that automatically pick the best algorithms by the way, in the form of declarative languages like SQL. They don't seem to work very well outside of the realm of fetching data from databases.
    - ActorNightly 3y ago
      >Javascript got popular because it was the only option to program for the web. That's it. If it wasn't as flexible as it was, another language would have taken it over. >Python and other dynamic languages don't "automatically manage types", they just let you not write the types down in the code. They do. They carry dynamic type information during runtime, and can be modified during runtime. >What you're describing is just magic compared to what we can do in 2023. Then you must think that stuff like branch prediction, and compiler optimizations are magic as well.
Koshkin 3y ago
It never seemed to me that "ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL." was a good idea. (FORTRAN, on the other hand, made a lot of sense.)

AlotOfReading 3y ago

People have been making similar predictions longer than either of us has been alive. Remember Cobol? Basically that. 5th generation languages? Same thing, with a different definition of "describe". Ultimately, those all turned out to be dead ends while the "antiquated" languages kept improving and innovating, albeit usually by (re-)inventing things that already existed elsewhere.

ActorNightly 3y ago
You are mistaking syntax for features. C++ got popular because it managed data structures under the hood automatically. I.e, you didn't have to keep track of memory offsets or function pointers. Java got popular because it did that and also managed memory allocation under the hood automatically. Python (and Javascript) got popular because it did all of that and also managed types under the hood automatically. The future is exactly this. Some language (or Python 5 or 6) is going to do all that except manage common processing algorithms for you automatically. For example, you will not need to import a library to convert xml to json, the .toJson call will be put through an AI inference algorithm that will essentially generate the required code for you on the fly, and more then that, it will do it in a much optimal way because it will recognize that the xml data follows a particular structure so it can optimize the search of the tags rather than doing a generic approach.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  The discussion isn't about C vs Python, it's about why Python won over Ruby, a language at a similar level of abstraction. Ruby is arguably even less burdensome because in many cases the libraries/frameworks do a lot of magic that would be unpythonic.
  - ActorNightly 3y ago
    Ruby has a lot more idiosyncracies, especially with cross platform stuff. Like I said, the more the language does for you, the more its going to "win".
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    AFAICT, Python won over Ruby because the support was largely in English, not Japanese, and because English is the language of global science and commerce and Japanese is the language of…Japan. Boosted by Python having a much better experience on the most common desktop environment (even though Python also favored Linux and, IIRC, other Unix-ish environments); Ruby experience on Windows eventually got tolerable, but even now that’s largely because there is a third-party project providing the main Ruby-on-Windows installer. The overwhelming advantage in ecosystem breadth and depth it had for this reason was insurmountable, even once Rails drew more attention to Ruby. There’s a whole bunch of technical advantages and disadvantages of each when you look at the language and core implementations, but I don’t think they were really the factors that led to the different relative popularity of the two.
- Mawr 3y ago
  Javascript got popular because it was the only option to program for the web. That's it. Python and other dynamic languages don't "automatically manage types", they just let you not write the types down in the code. The types still exist and need to be managed by the programmer. There's zero cognitive load improvement there. As for the AI stuff, lol. I see no point discussing concepts so far out of reach they're in the realm of sci-fi. What you're describing is just magic compared to what we can do in 2023. We already have languages that automatically pick the best algorithms by the way, in the form of declarative languages like SQL. They don't seem to work very well outside of the realm of fetching data from databases.
  - ActorNightly 3y ago
    >Javascript got popular because it was the only option to program for the web. That's it. If it wasn't as flexible as it was, another language would have taken it over. >Python and other dynamic languages don't "automatically manage types", they just let you not write the types down in the code. They do. They carry dynamic type information during runtime, and can be modified during runtime. >What you're describing is just magic compared to what we can do in 2023. Then you must think that stuff like branch prediction, and compiler optimizations are magic as well.

Koshkin 3y ago

It never seemed to me that "ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL." was a good idea. (FORTRAN, on the other hand, made a lot of sense.)