Perhaps off topic for this NG, though certainly a good topic for LtU,
but nevertheless D people might have some interesting insight on the
topic of data models (for programming languages).
So I'll begin with saying, "Forget the Hundred-Year Language"
c.f. http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html
and
http://tapestryjava.blogspot.com/2008/12/clojure-hundred-year-language.html
and drop the notion of the "Next Big Language" per se.
Let's take a step back and instead ask what might be the Next Big Data
Model or the Hundred-Year Data Model in the same vein as Paul Graham
contemplates (link above) a Hundred-Year Programming Language.
While discussions about programming languages, syntax, static vs dynamic
typing, etc are about ubiquitous and can be as emotional as political
and religious ideological discussions, it seems (to me at least) that
in-depth discussions about data models are few and far between.
Apart from the Third Manifesto (the relational database data model) made
famous in decades past
http://www.thethirdmanifesto.com/
there have been few advancements in abstract data models since then.
While there may be others, the only significant new data model in the
last decade that I know of is the XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model (XDM)
http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath-datamodel/
With the above preamble, I would like to ask members of the D community
to contemplate about what the ubiquitous data model of the future,
perhaps the Hundred-Year Data Model, might be in shape or form, taking a
programming language agnostic position.
Cheers,
Justin Johansson
