I <i>hope</i> it will be popular to write code that is elegant and easy to read. Code that anyone, including the author, can pick up decades later and understand what's going on right away.<p>Personally, I'd like to be programming in Pascal, with some new features added<p><pre><code> Heaps, Lists, Stacks, Queues, Dictionaries, and S-expressions all as first class objects.
A new *magical assignment operator* ::== (or something like it) that does reactive assignment... if anything on the right changes, the left gets updated every single time after that point. (Like assignment in a spreadsheet)
</code></pre>
It would be nice if we can finally get capability based security, so we can stop blaming the users, and put the fun back in computing.
I'd expect Codex style AI generated code to be everywhere. You think about what you want to do, define it, define the tests it needs to pass.<p>More effort would be focused into understanding the actual project requirements and dealing with architecture. There will likely be no more tasks that need less than an hour, because these can be solved instantly by AI. You're left with the hard problems or the problems that need design decisions and/or meetings to resolve.<p>AI will likely still have trouble doing more than a screen though, e.g. the entire flow of an app or site.<p>Programmers will resemble architects/PMs more. They're there to explain whether a job is doable, or what changes need to be made and how long it would take.
Less different than you'd think I'd say. All my career people think programming is on the verge of some major shift to managers just drawing diagrams or something.. But of course that never happens.<p>I think the most important change in the last twenty years has been the full acceptance of TDD. Maybe we'll get to everyone recognising continuous delivery or something like that as essential..<p>I'm sure there'll be a new "it" language threatening to displace the by-then majority use of go and rust. Meanwhile some carefully maintained C will still be keeping the lights on, and some poor (but well paid) individual will still be keeping some COBOL running.
1 We are gonna get more stackoverflow questions about AI
2. Typesystems will reach a breaking point, since more dynamic Data types will be introduced.
3. Functional programming is gonna be space language.
4. Compiler AI are gonna happen.
5. Storage would devastate performance.
6. Earth is gonna be represented in 2D as flat earth.
One terminal with your editor, one terminal with a shell running Make, maybe one more terminal to manually test/inspect the result.<p>Same as it's been since two terminals for a developer was affordable.
I think building cross-platform apps will get much more accessible with better tooling and frameworks.
Something in the intersection of Web, Electron and React Native.