Phil Windley is in town this week, and he asked this question:
What programming language will we use to write operating systems in 20 years time?[*]If we focus on operating systems per se, then the question is somewhat difficult to answer. Chances are we'll still be using *BSD, Linux, Win* and their descendants, which will continue to be written in C. Then there's the question, will we still care about operating systems in 20 years?
Leave all that aside. Operating systems are just a big piece of high performance infrastructure. Think about any large system, like database engines, webservers, app servers, UI environments, and whatnot.
It's an interesting question. What do you think?
*: The question is inspired by Paul Graham's quest for the 100-year language.
The (sad?) reality is that they will probably be C# or Java. A Windows written in C# might be a considerable improvement, while a Java based OS will only work because the hardward will finally be fast enough that people won't notice how doggy it is.
