Looking forward to 2016

So, it’s a new year. The slate has been cleaned. We can put 2015 behind us, and look ahead to 2016. From a programming point of view, what does this new year hold? Let’s take a look.

Programming languages

This year should be an exciting one if you like programming languages for their own sake.

  • JavaScript: Most everybody is using a browser capable of most of ECMAScript 5 (ES5). By the end of the year, expect both parts of that to increase. More people are going to have modern capabilities, and the browsers themselves will cover more of the standard. Speaking of standards, I’d look to ES6 support becoming more widespread in browsers, even Microsoft’s.

  • C++: The next revision of the C++ standard, C++17, is still a ways away. (You’re crazy if you’re betting on it actually coming out in 2017. Remember, C++11 was codenamed C++0x for years.) However, we should start seeing parts of it becoming fixed. Ranges are a big thing right now, concepts are coming (finally!), and it looks like C++ might get some sort of compile-time reflection. Things are looking up, but we’re not there yet.

  • Perl: I’m serious. Perl 6 is out. (I think that leaves Star Citizen as the final harbinger of Armageddon.) In the works for a decade and a half, with a set of operators best described by a periodic table, and seemingly designed to be impossible to implement, who can’t love Perl? At the very least, it’ll be fun to write in, and the new, incompatible version will spur a new generation of Perl golfers and other code artists. But I think it might turn out a bit like Python 3. Perl 5 has history, and that’s not going away.

  • The rest: I can easily see Rust gaining a bigger cult following over the next year, especially at places like Github. PHP has their version 7, but the less said about PHP, the better. C# and Java are going to be simmering for another twelve months, at least, and I don’t see much new news coming out of either of them. Ruby will continue its slow slide into irrelevance, probably dragging Python with it. (I wouldn’t mind them taking Haskell along, but I digress.) Newcomers will arise, and I’d say we’re in for another round of “visual coding”. And hey, maybe this will finally be the year for Scala.

Hardware and the like

The big thing on everyone’s lips right now is Vulkan, the official successor to OpenGL. It was supposed to be out in time for Christmas, but it got pushed back. (Funnily enough, the same thing happened two years ago with Kaveri, AMD’s first processor line that could support Vulkan. But I’m not bitter.) Personally, I don’t see much out of Vulkan this year. It’ll be released, and we’ll see a few early, buggy drivers and experimental alphas of games, most of which will be glorified tech demos. I’d give it till 2018 before I start worrying about replacing OpenGL.

Tiny computers are going to get bigger this year, I think. I mean that in a figurative way, of course. The Raspberry Pi 2 is the big name in this field, but you’ve also got the BeagleBone and things like that, not to mention the good old Arduino. However you look at it, it’s a mature area. We’ve moved beyond revolution, now it’s time for evolution. These computers will get more powerful, easier to use, and more ubiquitous. Next Christmas, I can easily see a stick computer being like this year’s quadcopters.

On the other hand, as much as I hate to say it, I’m not holding out a lot of hope for 3-D printing. We’ve been hearing about it for half a decade, and there has definitely been incremental progress. But 2016, in my opinion, is not going to be the year we see inexpensive 3-D printers flying off the shelves. They’ll stay in the background. (The whole “Internet of Things”, however, will only grow, but it’s not intended to be programmable, so it doesn’t help us.)

Libraries, engines, etc.

Look for Unity and Unreal to continue their competition, with a bunch of smaller guys chomping at the bit. Godot, assuming they don’t screw themselves over by switching to Vulkan prematurely, might get a boost as the indie engine of choice. And JavaScript engines have near-infinite upside, especially for mobile coding. Game development in 2016 will be like it was in 2015, but better in every way.

I do think the Node.js fad is dying down, and not a moment too soon. That doesn’t mean Node is done, only that I see people evaluating it for what it is, rather than what it’s advertised as. It’s the same thing as Ruby a few years ago, back in the early days of Rails. Or JavaScript and Angular a couple of years ago, for that matter. Still, Node is a solid platform for a lot of things. It’s not going away, but this is the year that it fades from the spotlight.

The same can be said for the current crop of JS web frameworks. There’s no chance of the whole Internet getting behind a single framework, nor two or even ten. But this is an area where the churn is so great, what’s popular next December hasn’t even been written yet. I can tell you that it’ll be slower, more bloated, and less comprehensible than what’s out there, though.

In the end

For programming, 2016 has a lot to look forward to, and I’ve barely scratched the surface here. (I haven’t even mentioned learning to code, which will get even bigger this coming year.) Whether native or browser, desktop or mobile, it’s a good time to code.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *