In the context of a Slashdot article dealing with a student asking questions of great programmers, the following question was asked of Linus Torvalds:
http://sztywny.titaniumhosting.com/2006/07/23/stiff-asks-great-programmers-answers/ *"- What do you think will be the next big thing in computer programming? X-oriented programming, y language, quantum computers, what?" His response was as follows: "* don't think we'll see a ?big jump". We've seen a lot of tools to help make all the everyday drudgery easier - with high-level languages and perhaps the integration of simple databases into the language being the main ones. But most of the buzz-words have been of pretty limited use. For example, I personally believe that ?Visual Basic" did more for programming than ?Object-Oriented Languages" did. Yet people laugh at VB and say it's a bad language, and they've been talking about OO languages for decades. And no, Visual Basic wasn't a great language, but I think the easy DB interfaces in VB were fundmantally more important than object orientation is, for example. So I think there will be a lot of incremental improvements, and the hardware improvements will make programming easier, but I don't expect any _huge_ productivity help or revolutions in how people do things. At least not until you start approaching real AI, and I don't think real AI is going to be anything you will ever ?program" This response is unbelievably telling. I'm floored. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: /pipermail/general_brlug.net/attachments/20061010/0404ddaa/attachment.html
