Frontier Journal (FJ): What's your perspective on next programming paradigm shifting after the shift from Structural Programming to Object-Oriented Programming? And which language will be the next big language based on the next big programming paradigm? Will that be a scripting language?
Grady Booch (GB): It's much easier to predict the past that it is the future. If we look over the history of software engineering, it has been one of growing levels of abstraction - and thus it's reasonable to presume that the future will entail rising levels of abstraction as well. We already see this with the advent of domain-specific frameworks and patterns. As for languages, I don't see any new interesting languages on the horizon that will achieve the penetration that any one of many contemporary languages has. I held high hopes for aspect-oriented programming, but that domain seems to have reached a plateau. There is tremendous need to for better languages to support massive concurrency, but therein I don't see any new, potentially dominant languages forthcoming. Rather, the action seems to be in the area of patterns (which raise the level of abstraction).
Software developing has been, is, and will remain fundamentally hard. Mashup architectures, fueled by AJAX and SOA in the enterprise domain, are taking root, but these are less fundamental and more pragmatically expeditious than anything.
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