Judging from their output, it looks like they're not very good computer programmers either.

The industry is now safe from cheap monkey programmers from Monkeyland.

Butlers may have a harder time, but, yaknow...

Every week or so I come back to this same question: will the C++ code I write today be totally cursed at and replaced in 10 years, when something better comes down the line?

Probably.

At my part-time, off-campus, job this summer(?) I needed to add TIFF file format exporting to the program I was writting. We had tried Quicktime in earlier versions, but the software we were working with really didn't like the large btye format that Quicktime outputted. (You see, TIFF gives you all different ways to shoot yourself.)

Luckily the company I worked for had an alternative TIFF library they had written back before Quicktime existed. (The application based off that library won them an Editors Choice award from one of the mac magazines at the time, I believe.)

That TIFF library was written in K&R style C, and, while converting K&R C into modern C isn't all that hard, it's a lot of fun looking at alien looking K&R stuff.

After getting it compiling, I had to deal with errors caused by the changes in the Mac Toolbox in the past 10 years.... even simple things like making sure you lock your handles before you dereference them.

This whole rant comes back to this: In the future people will probably look at the code I wrote today and either say "Ack, this isn't even close to compiling now", or say "Oh great... more C++... we really need to get this moved over to D" - or whatever the popular language of the day is then.

I suspect the language of the future won't be C++, although I'm not sure I see a serious competator. Yes, Python is a really nice language, but I don't know how well it scales for complex systems.

Objective-C is wicked cool, but I see it continuing to be a niche language used by OS X and refuge NeXT folk.

However, I do suspect that the language of the future will have weak type checking, and maybe a nice testing mechanism built into the language itself. It seems like a good bet - these seem to be everybody's gripes about the dominant languages of today (C++, Java)...

And no, I suspect the language of the Future won't be Pascal, either (It isn't the Once And Future Language, if you get my drift).

Includes documentation on how to do custom error messages... yum.