CRYPTOCHAOS

Speaking of languages, many of the problems we face today cannot be solved inside a single language or application. 

Some of this will be mitigated naturally as application-specific functions disappear into tools and frameworks. 

In general, it appears that Objects will diminish as a programming paradigm. 

Some people have talked about "polyglot programming". I think this is a red herring.

Regarding Java. I fear that Java will have to be abandoned to the "Enterprise Development" world. It will be relegated to the hands of cut-rate business coders bashing out their gray business applications for $30 / hour. We've passed the tipping point on this one. We used to joke that Java would be the next COBOL, but that doesn't seem as funny now that it's true

Where will innovation come from? Although some of the blush seems to be coming off Ruby, the reduction in hype has mainly allowed Ruby and Ruby on Rails developers to knuckle down and produce.  

 The big players here--Microsoft and Oracle--won't let some schemaless little upstarts erode their [database] market share.  

Douglas Crockford is Yahoo!'s JavaScript architect and a member of the committee designing future versions of the world's most popular programming language. Over first three months of 2010, Douglas delivered his acclaimed series of lectures on the history of JavaScript, its features, and its use. Links to video, transcripts, and photos from each of the events follows:

At this point I lost interest. I spent a fair bit of time in the 80's and 90's mucking around with this idea. In the end I decided that it was too hard and of limited value. Why this is so was primarily crystallized for me by Alistair Cockburn who explained that since people are the central element in software development, and people are inherently non-linear and unpredictable - such an effort is fundamentally doomed. Or at least it is until people become predictable agents that can be described with tractable mathematics - for which event I'm not holding my breath.