Re: An article in Science magazine about the future of

[tmoran@acm.org]

> I can't access full text of the article as well (they charge $10 per article
> for non-subscribers), ...

  You aren't missing much, IMO.  Here's my summary:

  Software is important - worldwide current investment of trillions of
dollars.  It has an error rate of 10 ..  10,000 /million lines, so there
are between 5 million and 50 billion bugs.  There are 5 million
programmers, producing an average 5K lines/yr.  [and presumably between 50
and 0.05 bugs/year]

  The "How Programming Languages Have Evolved" section gives a 600 word
history of programming languages.  Ada is not mentioned.

  Trends mentions Simplicity, Robustness, Portability, Internet
compatibility, and Concurrency.  It mentions C# and Java.  Part of
Simplicity is having a syntax familiar to C and C++ programmers.

  Languages of the Future mentions application specificity and research on
speech, gesture, etc.  "Each field has at least one language that is used
primarily by the practioners of that field.  Most college students today
are familiar with languages for editing documents, formatting papers,
creating presentations, and performing calculations."

Making Software Systems More Reliable mentions things like N-version
programming but "...programmers tend to make the same kind of mistakes
even if they don't communicate with one another."  "Researchers are
actively exploring many techniques to make more reliable software systems,
keeping the frailties of human programmers in mind.  Static type checking
and model checking provide promising avenues for detecting errors earlier
in the software life cycle."  Resilient, or even self-correcting, software
will take some time.