Thoughts on the future of programming languages

Human language tends to be arbitrary, and I believe that the opposite (specificity) is desirable in programming languages. Many people argue that the future of programming will involve dumbing things down as more and more people become programmers, and one way of dumbing things down is to use natural language. (I shudder at involuntary thoughts of COBOL.) Instead of dumbing languages down, I think it would be much more beneficial to raise the intelligence of the programmers. I hope that the future of programming languages tends toward mathematics, not human language.

Currently, I am often very happy with Haskell syntax for solving problems, when it is possible to define an implementation that is precise, concise, and easy to understand. For solving problems that do not easily map to Haskell syntax, using DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) to map from a representation designed for the problem in question to a Haskell representation still allows Haskell to be a good choice of language.