The Future of Code

The Future of Code is a collection of technical essays by Yukihiro Matsumoto, the inventor of the Ruby language, translated by Zhou Ziheng and published by Posts & Telecom Press in 2013 as part of the Turing Programming Series. Unlike the author's earlier book, The Programming World of Yukihiro Matsumoto, which ranges widely but is relatively scattered, this book unfolds around a clear theme: starting from the history of computers and programming languages, it reflects on the inner laws of technological evolution in the era of cloud computing, big data, and multicore processors, and offers its own judgments about future directions. The book has six chapters. The opening discusses the nature of programming and technological prediction on a time scale; it then reviews the evolution of programming languages, touching on fundamental mechanisms such as DSLs, metaprogramming, memory management, exception handling, and closures. Chapter Three focuses on the new language trends of the time, analyzing one by one the design orientations of emerging languages such as Go, Dart, CoffeeScript, and Lua, and asking whether they can replace C and JavaScript. Chapter Four turns to programming practice in the cloud computing era, discussing scalability, the C10K problem, interprocess communication, and topics such as Rack and Unicorn. Chapter Five introduces data storage technologies supporting big data, including key-value stores, NoSQL, using Ruby to operate MongoDB, the counterattack of SQL databases, and memcached. Chapter Six returns to the multicore era, moving from Moore's law and UNIX pipes to non-blocking I/O, and extending to node.js and ZeroMQ. The author connects these seemingly disparate technical points with the eye of a language designer; his core view is that programming languages will continue to evolve along the path of increasing abstraction, and that parallel processing and resource efficiency will become ever more important. Many of the book's specific judgments bear the imprint of the period around 2013, and some predictions have been corrected by reality, but as a work for understanding that wave of technological change and the thinking behind language design, it still has reference value.