According to Kurzweil your IT systems will be twice as powerful in 3 years. By 2013 or so we should be able to model a human brain in entirety on the world's most powerful machines. In time that power will hopefully trickle down to you and me. If you are like me, you write software, how are you going to use all that power? How are you going to produce all those features people need so rapidly?
If you've read my blog at all you'll know I'll tout the advance of the DSL and the dynamic language. I see these technologies on the JVM at a key inflection point between backwards compatibility and increased efficacy. They are transitional technologies at a key period in technological history.
The win in DSL, dynamic languages, and frameworks is always how succinctly you can get to your core thought or core idea. I don't really care about the ORM, the Ajax, the email most of the time. Most of the time there is a core idea I'm trying to work out.
In 24 months I need to be in the place where I can effectively divide the problems in front of me down into their key ideas. Keep the competing paradigms apart from each other. And then combine them at the right moments of confluence with a minimum of dissonance.
Get to the core thought, the core idea, ignore as much minutiae as possible, get the problem solved. Keep the idea clean. Keep the core thought from being tangled in a mess of details that have nothing to do with the answer you are after.
Advances in the way we create software will be key to the advance of the technologies of the future. If you are writing software today you will have to be prepared to leap a mighty chasm approaching us at break neck speed. That chasm will be paradoxically caused the increase of computational power available to us.
The problem of "traditional" programming that it is very procedural which can feel plodding at times. It takes forever to say anything meaningful. Yet before long we will have the ability to command computational power that could out strip our ability to speak into these systems with these sometimes unnecessarily verbose languages.
Consider that (in the video linked above) Kurzweil says that a scant 30 million bytes describes the whole of the human brain. The reason 30 million bytes could possibly hold the whole design for the human brain is that the brain's design is fractal and self organizing. A uniform underlying design is repeated with variation to create a whole. This is a similar goal to what we have in DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) code that means we express an idea and leverage that idea again and again.
In the case of our brains, that assembled whole adapts to inputs to form intelligent variation leading to astounding complexity and abilities. The subtle variation introduced by input creates the mote of a soul... or at the very least all the personality traits we recognize as a living person. If only we could write software that could reorganize itself like that.
Functional programming, rules engines, and dynamic languages promise to free us from those mind-killing details that we don't really care about anymore as application developers. But they don't really address the need to create adaptive systems or systems that are able to span across computational mediums.
I predict that there will have to be new programming languages that run in new ways that allow for fractal designs like the human brain. I happen to think these still need to be languages because they are still conversations between a creator and the created system. I dream about these systems acting like holograms or fractals in their nature.
If you cut a hologram in half you get two identical but smaller and fuzzier holograms. If you look at one part of a fractal you see the whole. I think human designed software can have the same quality. The idea isn't new I've heard the opposite idea called "dirt" and perhaps that's a good word but in my mind these form knots ... asymmetric distributions of thought where one idea unrelated to another must intersect in incongruent ways. Perhaps "dirt" is the antithesis of "fractal" or "crystal" design.
I say "fractal" or "crystal" because "modular" isn't strong enough. You can make modules all day long but if they don't allow for cleanly intersecting concerns then you don't haven't done much more than take a messy room and shovel it's contents into random boxes. You haven't actually organized things you've just cut down on the size of the mess you have to sift through.
Good code focuses on one concern at a time and tries to ignore details that are incidental. It should be that in daily programming activities we can use tools like AOP and DSL to focus on the foremost thought ignoring details of execution. Good code is reusable because it encapsulates one concern in a way that is clean enough and simple enough to be easily lifted out and reused.
That's good stuff because if you're like me you really get paid for some high level thought and some high level idea and not the millions of tiny details you have to move through to get there.
