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TheServerSide symposium

One take-away message from the TheServerSide symposium for me was(*): multi-language development is considered to be an important change in the future. In particular, DSL are hip at the moment, but some people think that in the future there will be many languages that we develop in at the same time.

I only partly agree with that. Looking back in history there always was a dominant programming language in each of the computing decades we saw so far: Mainframes had Cobol, Client-Server had C/C++, the Internet had Java. Right now, there is all this talk about Ruby, Python, ActionScript, Javascript, Scala, you name it. I think that we are in a post-Java language confusion that exists mainly because the next big decade in computing has not started, yet. Once it starts some new computing language will become the dominant player again. It will dominate because it will be the most versatile language for that computing environment. Probably, it will also have a big company behind it (see history above: IBM, Microsoft, Sun/IBM plus Google in a way).

If I knew what the next big thing was I had better things to do than writing blog posts. But my guess is that it will be something around small connected devices. We might look back and say that the Blackberry and the iPhone were early signs. If that turns out to be true than this new language will have a portable runtime, be small in size and extensible. I also guess that it will be open source from the start.


(*) the others were: Spring is as fat as J2EE and SOAP is so dead that even its proponents stopped defending it.

Update: just saw that TSS has an April's Fool post along these lines

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