History and Future of Programing Languages

Greetings from the Canberra branch of the Australian Computer Society where Dr Jan Newmarch, from Box Hill Institute, is speaking on "The history and future of programing languages". He sees there will be a division into complex (Java, Scala)and simple (Go, Rust) languages in the future.

Dr Newmarch prefers the simple languages, provided they easily support libraries from other languages. He pointed out the usefulness of reflection, where a program can examine and modify itself.

Dr Newmarch described object-orientated imperative languages as mainstream, with some functional techniques being introduced. He also described the explosion of specialist languages, such as R and frameworks which are almost languages, such as Hadoop.

At question time Dr Newmarch  as asked about Australian developed programming languages. I suggested "Blue", which he explained was a teaching language from University of Sydney. 

While in Canberra, Dr Newmarch has been introducing the Australian Government to the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry PI is a recent product of the "Cambridge Phenomenon".

ps:  Dr Richard P. Gabriel and Dr Guy Steele reprised their presentation "50 in 50: 50 Programming Languages in 50 Years" in Canberra in 2010.