The Future of Programming Interview

Posted by Paul on January 3, 2013

Sean Morris, Implementation Executive at TradeDoubler Interviews Paul Feakins, Managing Director at Antropy.

Sean: Industry standards of programming languages, how they are changing, what will the norm be in the future?
Paul: I think that previously companies were very attracted by the support from big software vendors and were very willing to pay big license fees for a supported and finished product. I think that we're going to see a lot more open source technologies, from Linux and PHP to the Firefox web browser. Closed proprietary systems will fall out of favour, even when they're extremely well-written like the Flash player.

Sean: What is your current job role and how long have you been working there?
Paul: Managing Director of Antropy Consulting Limited. Nearly 3 years.

Sean: In your work, which programming languages do you use and how do they help you your day to day tasks?
Paul: PHP, CSS and SQL are the languages of choice for several reasons, main ones being the large amount of open source software and developers available.

Sean: What are the advantages and disadvantages of the programming language you use?
Paul: PHP is more complicated than my previous server side language, ColdFusion but it does have more features, more open source software, much lower cost and more developers.

Sean: How do you feel the industry standards have changed in regards to programming knowledge in IT based job roles?
Paul: People are expected to learn new frameworks and technologies extremely quickly and people in good programming roles would be expected to have knowledge of esoteric concepts such as design patterns.

Sean: Are basic programming languages like HTML and JavaScript becoming archaic? How are these being built upon to adapt to new situations?
Paul: Absolutely not, they're really at the forefront of web application development and therefore application development in general. They are evolving and developing faster than ever before and are being used in new ways by programmers all over the world on a daily basis.

Sean: In a digital age are there expectations that more people have better understanding of programming, even if on the basic level of html and Javascript?
Paul: Yes, as more and more things happen online, JavaScript and HTML have entered the lexicon. It would be unlikely that even the most technophobic web user wouldn't have heard the acronym HTML.

Sean: Why do you believe so?
Paul: Many things are now impossible to do without internet access, so everyone is expected to use the Internet at some point.

Sean: Do you believe the standards of programming knowledge will continue to rise in the future and what ways do you expect the frameworks to change to adapt to new scenarios?
Paul: Absolutely! I would hope to see programming being taught again at a very early age in schools. Even if this doesn't happen, more and more programmers will be needed and more and more exciting roles will exist for them such as programming robots and other hi-tech devices. In general, programming will evolve to become even more high-level so programmers will need to know less and less about the underlying hardware and code will become more and more readable. It will allow programmers to focus more on the problems they're trying to solve rather than the quirks of the language/hardware.

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