The Future of Programming Languages

A co-worker and I got into a discussion about the new features of C++0x and I got to thinking about where we are going with programming languages. I think there's only so much farther that standard procedural or object oriented languages are going to go. The next thing is going to be a new wave of distributed computing programming languages, something that will have language features to support MapReduce and a new kind of parallel programming. Maybe it'll be Sawzall. I read the paper, but I have a hard time thinking in terms of how to write code with it. Hopefully whatever comes along won't require that much of a change in how we think of programming. I never really got the whole Lisp thing. I'll re-read up on Sawzall and see if I can better understand it the second time around.

GPL for Java

I'm very surprised that Sun chose the GPL as the open source license instead of an Apache/BSD license. For the uninitiated, the Gnu Public License more or less says that any changes you make to the source must also be given away as open source. The BSD license is more flexible and boils down to you can do anything you want with the source code like give it away, make changes, package it with your application. The only thing you cannot do under the BSD license is claim that you wrote the code.

The major complaint about the GPL is its viral nature. If you make a change to the source code, you have to give away all your changes and it taints your code such that it should all be licensed under the GPL. It's more complex than that, but that is sort of how it works. Businesses like to keep their changes internally for intellectual property and security reasons. Businesses prefer BSD licenses because it puts very few restrictions on what you can do with the code. While Linux uses the GPL, I am more of a fan of the BSD way. I think in the end BSD just does a better job of attracting users because business users freely adopt BSD licensed source code because they don't have to be so concerned about giving away security and intellectual property secrets.

I'm curious why Sun is giving away Java as GPL. I think it does help them insulate from forks in the Java code, but I still question whether that's a good enough reason. All the Apache projects seems to do just fine with BSD.