The next software development revolution is here… Are you ready?

I'm not convinced that the answer is simply "functional programming". Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of functional programming, however I think that the bulk of evidence shows that the number of people willing to use functional languages is still relatively small.

I think we're likely to see more continuation of the trend of quasi-functional features leaking into imperative languages.

I also think that we'll see more of a shift towards features (such as type systems) that provide stronger correctness and safety guarantees.

And finally, I think the victor in any future programming language fight will be something that enables greater degrees of parallelism and concurrency (especially of a distributed nature) without significant additional effort.

So I think that will be what the masses want. As for me, none of the current crop of functional languages coming through particularly excite me. There don't appear to be any particularly "disruptive" technologies emerging into the PL mainstream, and even at the fringes there are only a few notable examples that I think could hold promise for more than the next 3 or 4 years.