The Past, Present & Future of Programming Languages • Kevlin Henney • GOTO 2024

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Some interesting points to ponder about in relation to programming language history and future evolution.

I found it amusing that Kevlin borrowed some material from The Craft of Coding blog of Michael Wirth. If you don’t know him yet, Wirth has several very lucid articles on Fortran and programming in general. Before retirement Wirth taught at University of Guelph, including a course on “Software for Legacy Systems” (among others), “a course where you program in Fortran, Ada, and COBOL, some of the most dinosaur-esque languages out there still in use” as described by a student of his.

At one point Kevlin talks about functional styles of programming. It reminded me of @milancurcic’s blog post (Map, Filter, Reduce in Fortran 2018 | by Milan Curcic | Modern Fortran | Medium).

The co-routines section of the talk was interesting. These have also been suggested for Fortran before:

I suppose the big question in Fortran evolution now is from which language will the generics be borrowed from. A few of the suggested (ekhm, contended) approaches:

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Thanks for that link. Reading his three last blog articles about retirement and academia was pleasant:
https://craftofcoding.wordpress.com/2025/03/06/on-life-in-retirement-from-academia/
https://craftofcoding.wordpress.com/2025/02/10/reflections-on-25-years-in-academia/
https://craftofcoding.wordpress.com/2025/02/02/only-now-at-the-end-do-you-understand/