The Next Generation of Programming

We define programming broadly as the step from specification to runningprogram, which consists in designing the architecture and its abstractionsand coding them into a programming language. Up to now, programming has been taught more as a craft than as an engineering discipline. Usually, programming is taught in the context of one (or a few) programming languages (e.g., Java, complemented with Haskell or Scheme). The historical accidents of the particular languages chosen are so closely interwoven with the fundamental concepts that the two cannot easily be separated. There is confusion between tools and concepts. This has led to different programming communities, based on different programming ‘paradigms’: object-oriented, logic, functional. The unity of programming as a single discipline has been lost. So programsoften suffer from poor design. For instance, concurrency in Java is complex and expensive, so its use is discouraged. So Java taught programmers conclude that concurrency is always complex and expensive.