I’m really not sure what to say about EWD 1036. This is a must read for people who think we can write better software programs.

Programming will be so different in the future, that people will talk about this time, as the great false start or the Dark Ages of programming.

The coming age (I don’t think it has started yet), will be based on mathematics. The software we write will have sturdy theoretical underpinnings that will evolve with the software we write. Where formal methods seem unwieldy now, we will see ways to simplify these. We will prove theorems about structures and these structures will be used again and again. We will find structures in our programming languages and programs and simplify and use these structures from one program to the next.

Programming will be easier than it ever was. We will write programs that are bigger and better than a human has ever seen.