This talk by Bret Victor is an eye opener. It was delivered by Bret in 2013. He gave this talk assuming we are in 1973 and then talked about how future of programming will look like in 2013. He talked about various CS discoveries and programming approaches people were trying during 1960 and 1970 era. At that time, nobody new what is correct way to program so they were experimenting with many different approaches. Nobody was fixated on one right approach so different approaches were tried.
The talk shared four key ideas that we can expect from future programming languages looking back from 1973.
- coding -> direct manipulation of data
- procedures -> goals and constraints
- text dump -> spatial representation of data
- sequential -> concurrent
The sad part is most of us still code procedures in a text format that runs sequentially.
Bret Victor says:
It is easy to adopt new technology but it could be hard to adopt new ways of thinking.
Shekhar Gulati 