What is computer science actually like?

What will Computer Science and Programming be like in the far future?

• When 5th and eventually even 6th generation languages become powerful and viable enough to replace current languages, how will it affect software development, and the field in general? Will programming become something even the most technically challenged users could accomplish to some degree? Will software engineering become a "blue collar" profession? Also, eventually, we will have discovered and achieved the maximum in computer science, where software, hardware, and reality converge into one. Hardware will have reached the limits of von Neumann architecture. What field would exist to replace computer science when that time comes?

• Answer:

  There's no programming language that's good for everything. Not even "natural language". We invented maths notation so that people who are "natural intelligences" could communicate more precisely and effectively about certain abstract things. No profession, from medicine to law to theoretical physics to art criticism is without its jargon which can only be understood by those who've taken the time and effort to achieve a certain level of familiarity with it. Programming won't therefore become something that untrained people do by conversing in everyday language, for the simple reason that most programming will still be about involving the computers in specialist activities, and will need specialist understanding of those activities. Such specialist understanding actually prefers more formal and unambiguous notation rather than trying to use conversational natural language. (Even ideas and services that everyone uses and thinks they understand  (think banking, or Facebook) still have complex conceptual ideas  specifying how they actually work and deal with edge-cases behind the scenes. You would be hard  pressed to specify how your bank or Facebook work to another human  being, despite that human being being "AI complete". ) So, most likely, programming will fragment into more and more "domain-specific languages" for the increasing number of niches that are programmable. Each will be full of domain-specific assumptions and knowledge, though they may sometimes be different dialects of some basic grammatical syntactic patterns. (An example of this is XML which acts as a syntactic substrate to many different data formats.) Apart from XML, C and Lisp are syntaxes which will probably still be hanging around. There'll be many of these specialist languages that still use C-like or Lisp-like notation because that's what people are used to. The other thing about these domain-specific languages is that many of them will be hooked into huge online data-bases and cloud hosted services. (A bit like the Wolfram Language). You'll rarely write code to run by itself as much as you'll use it to present your problem to the cloud service and reformat the returning data. There'll still be "serious" programming languages for defining and orchestrating what goes on behind the scenes.  Such languages will have the following characteristics : - they'll be good for defining and hosting these other DSLs. - they'll have facilities for defining data-flow between systems. (Most likely some kind of reactive programming). Because the important thing about programming in the future is that you'll very rarely be programming one computer. You'll be programming an application that's distributed amongst many : servers and phones, the sensors and actuators of the "internet of things", multiple robots etc. - they'll aim to be as powerful, expressive and error free as possible. (If all of this leads you to think of Haskell, that's deliberate .. .though it may not be Haskell itself.)