Question

What do you think the next great programming language will be? How will it work, and how will software engineers use it? (6 – 10 pages) Also include conclusion and references.

Answer 1

“Having a single language suitable for both the front and the back would be a lot more productive for programmers,” Bright says. “D aims to be that language.”For Alexandrescu, D is unique. It’s not just that it combines speed and simplicity. It also has what he calls “modeling power.” It lets coders more easily create models of stuff we deal with in the real world, including everything from bank accounts and stock exchanges to automative sensors and spark plugs. D, he says, doesn’t espouse a particular approach to modeling. It allows the programmer “to mix and match a variety of techniques to best fit the problem.”For Facebook, this is still a research project. But the company has hosted the past two D conferences—most recently in May—and together with various Facebook colleagues, Alexandrescu has used D to rebuild two select pieces of Facebook software. They rebuilt the Facebook “linter,” known as Flint, a means of identifying errors in other Facebook software, and they fashioned a new Facebook “preprocessor,” dubbed Warp, which helps generate the company’s core code.In both cases, D replaced C++. That, at least for the moment, is where the language shines the most. When Bright first started the language, he called it Mars, but the community that sprung up around the language called it D, because they saw it as the successor to C++. “D became the nickname,” Bright says. “And the nickname stuck.”Facebook is the most high-profile D user. But it’s not alone. Sociomantic—a German online advertising outfit recently purchased by British grocery giant Tesco for a reported $200 million—has built its operation in D. About 10,000 people download the D platform each month. “I’m assuming it’s not the same 10,000 every month,” Alexandrescu quips. And judging from D activity on various online developer services—from GitHub to Stackoverflow—the language is now among the 20 to 30 most popular in the world.Yes, like C++ and Java, D is a compiled language, meaning that you must take time to transform it into executable software before running it. Unlike with interpreted languages, you can’t run your code as soon as you write it. But it compiles unusually quickly. Bright—who worked on C++, Java, and Javascript compilers at Symantec and Sun .Anderson, this is another reason that D feels more like an interpreted language. “It’s usually very, very fast to compile–fast enough that the edit [and] run cycle usually feels just like an interpreted language.” He adds, however, that this begins to change if your program gets very large.The trouble with the language, according to Alexandrescu, is that it still needs a big-name backer. “Corporate support would be vital right now,” he says. This shows you that Facebook’s involvement only goes so far, and it provides some insight into why new languages have such trouble succeeding. In addition to backing Hack, Facebook employs some of the world’s leading experts in Haskell, another powerful but relatively underused language. What D needs, Alexandrescu says, is someone willing to pump big money into promoting it. The Java programming language succeeded, he says, because Sun Microsystems put so much money behind it back in the ’90s.

Certainly, D still faces a long road to success. But this new language has already come further than most.