Recently I became involved with the Dublin Java Meetup Group, a users group getting together once a month to talk all things Java. Having a think about the topic for discussion at the next meeting, Java after 10 years, got me to thinking. What comes next? The IT indiustry has moved on from one language to another for decades. Each successive language giving more power, more capabilities, than its predecessors.
So here we are in 2005. The most used languages in use at the moment according to ITJobsWatch are Java, C++, C# and VB (in that order). Are the minor incremental changes we’re seeing between language versions the future with the programmers in these languages safe in their jobs for the long haul (including greenfields work, not just maintainence like the COBOL guys) or is there still some huge paradigm shift left , as from procedural to OO programming, that will force another cycle of starting from scratch with a new platform and its idiosyncracies to learn all over again? Aspect oriented programming looks like it could unsettle things, but there are already AO language extensions to the mainstream platforms – things like AspectWerkz and JBoss AOP. There’s not all that much on the horizon…