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I half agree. While new programming languages will make solving today's problems easier, there will be new problems that they won't solve, and so in 20 years pe

by blowski 12y ago

I half agree. While new programming languages will make solving today's problems easier, there will be new problems that they won't solve, and so in 20 years people will be moaning about the problems the contemporary languages don't solve. For example, one of the biggest problems with building websites ten years ago was that you had to slice everything into tiny images because of table-based layouts. Now we've got CSS3 with SASS and Compass and that's no longer a problem. But whereas then, 90% of users were using IE6 on a 15 or 17 inch monitor, now my users are on a multitude of browsers and screen sizes.

Peaker 12y ago
If your language is versatile enough, has adaptable syntax, and powerful at DSLs, it can adapt to future requirements quite well. Haskell is great at concurrency and parallelism not because the language was designed around those at all - but because the language is well designed, and focuses at communicating the programmer's intent, rather than implementation details. This intent is more directly translatable to correct concurrent code than an imperative spec which is inherently lower-level.