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Of course, I'm making a big assumption in even asking what programming languages will be like in a hundred years. Will we even be writing programs in a hundred years? Won't we just tell computers what we want them to do?

There hasn't been a lot of progress in that department so far. My guess is that a hundred years from now people will still tell computers what to do using programs we would recognize as such. There may be tasks that we solve now by writing programs and which in a hundred years you won't have to write programs to solve, but I think there will still be a good deal of programming of the type that we do today.

It may seem presumptuous to think anyone can predict what any technology will look like in a hundred years. But remember that we already have almost fifty years of history behind us. Looking forward a hundred years is a graspable idea when we consider how slowly languages have evolved in the past fifty.

Languages evolve slowly because they're not really technologies. Languages are notation. A program is a formal description of the problem you want a computer to solve for you. So the rate of evolution in programming languages is more like the rate of evolution in mathematical notation than, say, transportation or communications. Mathematical notation does evolve, but not with the giant leaps you see in technology.

Whatever computers are made of in a hundred years, it seems safe to predict they will be much faster than they are now. If Moore's Law continues to put out, they will be 74 quintillion (73,786,976,294,838,206,464) times faster. That's kind of hard to imagine. And indeed, the most likely prediction in the speed department may be that Moore's Law will stop working. Anything that is supposed to double every eighteen months seems likely to run up against some kind of fundamental limit eventually. But I have no trouble believing that computers will be very much faster. Even if they only end up being a paltry million times faster, that should change the ground rules for programming languages substantially. Among other things, there will be more room for what would now be considered slow languages, meaning languages that don't yield very efficient code.

And yet some applications will still demand speed. Some of the problems we want to solve with computers are created by computers; for example, the rate at which you have to process video images depends on the rate at which another computer can generate them. And there is another class of problems which inherently have an unlimited capacity to soak up cycles: image rendering, cryptography, simulations.

If some applications can be increasingly inefficient while others continue to demand all the speed the hardware can deliver, faster computers will mean that languages have to cover an ever wider range of efficiencies. We've seen this happening already. Current implementations of some popular new languages are shockingly wasteful by the standards of previous decades.

This isn't just something that happens with programming languages. It's a general historical trend. As technologies improve, each generation can do things that the previous generation would have considered wasteful. People thirty years ago would be astonished at how casually we make long distance phone calls. People a hundred years ago would be even more astonished that a package would one day travel from Boston to New York via Memphis.

I can already tell you what's going to happen to all those extra cycles that faster hardware is going to give us in the next hundred years. They're nearly all going to be wasted.

I learned to program when computer power was scarce. I can remember taking all the spaces out of my Basic programs so they would fit into the memory of a 4K TRS-80. The thought of all this stupendously inefficient software burning up cycles doing the same thing over and over seems kind of gross to me. But I think my intuitions here are wrong. I'm like someone who grew up poor, and can't bear to spend money even for something important, like going to the doctor.

Some kinds of waste really are disgusting. SUVs, for example, would arguably be gross even if they ran on a fuel which would never run out and generated no pollution. SUVs are gross because they're the solution to a gross problem. (How to make minivans look more masculine.) But not all waste is bad. Now that we have the infrastructure to support it, counting the minutes of your long-distance calls starts to seem niggling. If you have the resources, it's more elegant to think of all phone calls as one kind of thing, no matter where the other person is.


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