The Past, Present & Future of Programming Languages • Kevlin Henney • YOW! 2025
Kevlin Henney explores the slow but profound evolution of programming languages, revealing how many 'new' features are decades-old concepts. He analyzes language popularity rankings, highlighting the dominance of 20th-century languages and the impact of the "von Neumann bottleneck." The talk delves into historical innovations from Fortran to Algol, coroutines to functional programming, and concludes by examining how Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming clients of existing languages, further entrenching the mainstream rather than causing radical change, often due to their training data favoring established codebases.
