The future of programming

Abstract

The nature of programming is changing. These changes will accelerate as Improved software development practices and more sophisticated development tools and environments are produced. This paper surveys the most likely changes in the programming task and in the nature of software over the short term, the medium term, and the long term.In the short term, the focus is on gaius in programmer productivity through improved tools and hitegrated development environments. In the medium term, programmers will be able to take advantage of libraries of software components and to make use of packages that generate programs automatically for certain kinds of common systems. Over the longer term, the nature of programming will change even more significantly as programmers become able to describe desired functions in a nonprocedural way, perhaps through a set of rules or formal specification languages. As these changes occur, the job of the application programmer will become increasingly analysis-oriented and software developers will be able to attack a large number of application areas which could not previously be addressed effectively.

Systems analysis

“…Estimates on the need for software professionals in the 1990s range from 1 to 2.4 million (compared to about 250,000 today] [23]. • The relative cost of the hardware component is decreasing drastically (from 90 percent in the 1950s to 10 percent in the 1990s), whereas the relative cost of software is increasing at a similar rate [35,43]. • The maintenance cost for a developed system (throughout its life cycle) is 2-4 times greater than the predelivery cost.…”

Computers and Education: the software production problem

“…Once again, however, these improvements are mostly to the coding rather than the specification stage. Nevertheless, this software-tools research should eventually provide the facility of rapidprototyping some simple programs (Wasserman and Gutz, 1984): that is, providing the user very quickly with some 'runnable' approximation of what they need, to be modified and adapted to suit their specific needs as they experiment with the prototype.…”

Selection and use of general-purpose programming languages

“…Many experts believe that the practice of application development and maintenance is now on the verge of a transition comparable to that between assembler and high-level languages [Mart82], [Wass82]. Traditionally, the task of the programmer/analyst has been to devise algorithms that solve the problem presented by the end-user.…”