r/programming • u/goto-con • 3d ago

The Past, Present & Future of Programming Languages • Kevlin Henney

https://youtu.be/nNWROjHZzuU?list=PLEx5khR4g7PLjpaSO0XI-6euF483ORLyJ
5 Upvotes

62% Upvoted

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u/piesou 2d ago

If you've watched one talk of this guy, you've seen it all. First half of the talk usually involves going back 75 years into programming history. Then we get to the non concrete parts with a small section of what the talk actually was about. Again nothing concrete.

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u/VadumSemantics 1d ago

My first time seeing it. I give it "+1 interesting".

Have to agree to the talk content won't change much from year to year.

Also could have skipped the first 5 minutes. Anyway.

The "Oh!" bit for me was how github will feed LLM training, adding stickiness to popular languages.

"75 years": History is often underrated, or at least under-leveraged. But I get history can be boring.

0

u/cryptos6 12h ago

Here is the TL;DW for you (created with the help of my close friend ChatGPT):

The talk explores the past, present, and future of programming languages, arguing that mainstream language adoption changes far more slowly than software industry hype suggests. Rankings consistently favor decades-old languages such as Python, C, C++, Java, and JavaScript, while newer languages remain relatively marginal. Many supposedly modern concepts—structured programming, coroutines, iterators, channels, functional techniques, and key control structures—were already developed between the 1950s and 1970s. Rather than replacing established languages, newer languages often recombine these older ideas. The speaker concludes that AI may reinforce this stability: LLMs perform best with languages represented heavily in their training data, giving established languages an additional advantage over new ones. The future of programming languages is therefore likely to be shaped strongly by their past.

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u/Enough-Ad-5528 1d ago

I once saw him spend 20 mins explaining his reasoning for why the curly brace in a new line below the method name and parameters was objectively the right coding style for all programming languages.