Most Popular Programming Languages In The Next 30 Years

As part of my full-time job, I need to work with multiple programming languages which forces me to wonder what's there next I need to learn to keep up. This article is my attempt to predict what programming be like 30 years from now by analyzing what is here today.

Multiparadigm

There's no doubt programming languages are constantly evolving. Every year, new languages are created while others fall by the wayside. A few trends are gaining traction in the programming world.

One is the rise of functional programming. This paradigm has been around for a while, but it's only recently that it's started to gain mainstream adoption.

The second trend is the increasing popularity of statically typed languages. Statically typed languages are more challenging to learn than their dynamically typed counterparts, but they often benefit in terms of performance and code quality.

Another huge trend I see is language interoperability. Interoperability allows developers to use multiple languages within a single project and make transitions smoother from one language to another. That feature is already widely used in today's JVM languages like Java&Kotlin, .NET languages like VB&C# or superset languages like JavaScript&TypeScript, and I defiantly expect that to stay.

But the most significant trend is about multi-paradigm languages. The languages that support multi-paradigm programming (like Rust) are gaining popularity fast. They take certain aspects from statically and dynamically typed, functional, object-oriented and procedural programming to combine the best from each and give developers more freedom in terms of style. Someone might say that harms "clean code", but statistics say people like to have a choice.

Evolution

All goes toward simplifying, unification and programming languages are not an exception.

I see different languages share the same best practices and approaches even now. This trend will most likely be even more popular in the future. Once something handy appears in one language, it is quickly adopted in another language with new releases. It's either evolve or die principle.

Here is some example written in TypeScript:

const makeGreetings = () => (name?: string) => `Greetings, ${name}!`;

and here is the same code written in Kotlin:

fun makeGreetings() = fun(name: String?) = "Greetings, ${name}!"

Even though it's not the same, you should spot a common idea of functional style programming, immutable and nullable variable declaration(?) and "string" operations.

What to expect next

Programming Languages of the future may be very different from what we are used to today. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, new programming languages will likely be developed to suit these tasks better. In addition, as more devices become connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), there will be a need for languages that can handle the large volumes of data generated by these devices.

Here are some possible future programming languages:

• AIspeak - this language would be explicitly designed for AI applications. It would allow programmers to create algorithms that can learn and improve over time.
• DataScript - this language would be optimized for working with big data sets. It would offer features such as parallel processing and distributed computing to make working with large amounts of data more efficient.
• IoTascript - this language would be made for programming IoT devices. It would include support for connecting to various sensors and actuators, as well as managing security and privacy concerns.

Programming as nothing we know today is also possible that is whole different story.

Conclusion

There are a lot of programming languages out there, and new ones are constantly being created. But which ones will be the most popular after 30 years from now? Probably none of those exists today, so don't worry too much 😉.

According to Wikipedia average age of most popular programming languages right now is less than 30 years although there are some really old individuals and time is still ticking for them.

Many of the popular programming languages today support functional or declarative programming. Some of them are interoperable like Java&Kotlin, JavaScript&TypeScript, C++&Rust and these kinds of languages will likely be in high demand even after many years.

Obviously, all this is only my assumption along with made-up language names but one thing I know for sure - programming languages of the future will defiantly be Harder, Better, Faster and Stronger (just like in this inspiring song). We just have to wait a bit.

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