Tuesday, April 27, 2010

A *language* in the top-10 technologies

In its estimation of the 10 most important emerging technologies for the year 2010, Technology Review mentions a programming language.

Yes, a language.

When we started Ateji, the common wisdom was that language was an irrelevant artifact of the programming process. I'm glad to see that we were on the right track, and that the importance of language is now acknowledged even in the most prestigious magazines.

We're preparing an offering for cloud programming that will let the same source code run indifferently on desktop PCs, multi-core servers, clusters, or in the cloud, while remaining compatible with existing tools and practice. This takes the form of a language extension, and wouldn't have been possible without language technology and clever language design.