Future of Programming


There is a talk by Richard Feldman at a conference called Predicting the Future of the Web Development (2020 and 2025). It is from the perspective of computer programming insiders. Here is a brief summary of that talk.

Richard says that you are better to carefully try to predict what will happen 5 years from now than just pick existing, proven boring technology. Examples of these big boring technologies that have faded away from popularity are Perl and LAMP. Since predicting is safer than following blindly, here are a few of Richard’s predictions.

  • HTML and CSS continue to dominate the web in the near future
  • TypeScript will do well and continue to grow in popularity
  • Web Assembly (WASM) expands the web-app pie but will not replace anything
  • Node Package Manager (npm) survives any woes it has had and will have
  • JS alternatives stay niche in terms of popularity but age well (survive) and therefore a good thing to bet on

Languages that Comple to JavaScript

New languages and transpilers produce code that can work in the browser without the programmer having to write any lines of JavaScript. JS alternatives include elm and TypeScript. Some more examples are Dart, PureScript, CoffeeScript, ClojusreScript, Scala.js, Reason, Haxe and Nim.