Lambda the Ultimate

It's been a while since I submitted a story...here is some food for thought!

What will programming look like in 20 years? Maybe it will be based on a "definitive language" like the speculations of the article Convergence in language design: a case of lightning striking four times in the same place (FLOPS 2006). Such a language will have a layered structure and its handling of concurrency is important. (Whether it is dynamically or statically typed is of absolutely no importance, BTW.)

How will we program with such a language? Maybe we will program with feedback loops, as explained in Self management and the future of software design (FACS 06). This seems to be one way to handle complexity, the inevitability of software and hardware faults, and managing global behavior of a system. I am coordinating a new project, SELFMAN, that is looking at this.

Comments?

Hello LtU's,

I'm new here, although I've been visiting this site for more than a year. I'am a CS student, interested in programming languages and compiler construction. I'm good at C, Java, C#, doesn't matter. I love Lisp and read about it more than I did with any other language, but I never really used it much. I also love Ruby and try to use it everywhere I can.

The thing is, ever since I learned Ruby, I never had the urge to learn any other programming language, and I'm starting to feel like I'm missing something.

So, is it Scala? Haskell? Nemerle, OCaml? Anything else? Which one should I learn now to become a better programmer?

Thanks,

Luís Pureza

P.S.: By the way... any Book recommendations? Thanks again.
P.S.2: Wondering if this is the right place to ask this... Please, feel free to delete this post if it isn't.