12 predictions, 5 years: The future of programming

Technology trends move fast, and the tools for building those technologies constantly evolve. If you don’t lift your head up to look past your current projects, you could end up coding yourself down a rabbit hole.

To help you prepare for a future that’s screaming across the sky faster than we can see, we’ve compiled a dozen predictions about how the next five years of programming will shake out. Our crystal ball is very subjective, and some of the following conjectures might not prove universal. Some won’t be fully realized in five years. Others are already true, but their truth is not as well-established as it will be soon.

Read ’em quickly because the future is changing faster than we know.  

Databases of the future are certain to do more than just store numbers. Many already have sophisticated report engines (aka business intelligence), and these extras will become more powerful, enabling databases to run more sophisticated algorithms on tables, search more efficiently for patterns in data, and do much of the work currently touted by the buzzword “big data.”

This power and sophistication will be driven by the cost of moving data around. Leaving the data in the database and letting its engine perform the analysis will be much faster than extracting it to a separate big data package because it will limit the overhead of communication and decrease the amount of programming necessary to extract value from the data store.