What is the Future of Code?

What Excel, Roblox, RPA, No-code and BigTech can teach us about the future of code.

This is short Op-Ed on the future of programming and code. It’s meant only to stimulate some ideas around a few topics such as the recent advent of low code-no code type thinking and platforms.

I enjoy reading about how low code/no code platforms will change and democratize coding for organizations. But no code is still code.

Think about the history of programing and computing. The first computers were programmed with switches or punch cards, until the keyboard was invented.

Coding became a matter of typing numbers or machine language, until Grace Hopper invented the modern compiler and the COBOL language, ushering in decades of innovation in programming languages and platforms.

Languages like Fortran, Pascal, C, Java and Python evolved in a progression, where the newest language (built using an older language) enabled programmers to “code” using increasingly more human language.

In the future developers might work alongside an AI partner, that helps them work faster and cleaner. Quantum computing might change what coding means as well as our capacity to manipulate information changes with the underlying technology.

You might enjoy my A.I. Newsletter called A.I. Supremacy here.

Excel and Roblox - Stories about Code’s Future

You could argue that even Microsoft Excel, Excel, is sort of a low-code/no-code way of writing programs, people do run programs, their spreadsheets are programs. You can do things, you type stuff in, and you run the program and things happen at the bottom of the spreadsheet where it delivers the answer, right?

On the Metaverse platform Roblox, children use code in Roblox’s gaming community that is written in a language called Lua and is stored and run from scripts. Roblox is developing a Creator Economy based on its own digital currency for children to create their own games.

Think about it, Roblox recently said it paid out $538.3 million to developers on its gaming platform—also known as creators—in 2021, beating an earlier projection of $500 million, according to financial figures released on Tuesday. Two years ago, that figure was $112 million, the company pointed out. The majority of these “creators” are kids under 14 years old.

As of September 2020, gaming company Roblox Corporation reported that 29 percent of Roblox games users were aged from 9 to 12 years worldwide. Additionally, 25 percent of Roblox games users were under the age of 9. Only 13 percent of Roblox games users were aged 13 to 16. So on the internet today kids are learning about the future of code connected to massive Creator Economies of scale.

That too is the future of coding occuring at the intersection of gaming and peer networks.

In retrospect we might think of Microsoft Excel as a kind of legacy no-code tool. Alongside languages, we’ve seen the evolution of “no-code” platforms — including Microsoft Excel, the 1980s granddaddy of no-code — that empower people to program computers in a visual interface, whether in school or in the workplace.

Google built the underlying TensorFlow software with the C++ programming language. But in developing applications for this AI engine, coders can use either C++ or Python, the most popular language among deep learning researchers. Now in 2022, Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind has created a new coding engine called AlphaCode, that it says is as competent as an average programmer.

The Future of Coding is both No-Code and Code Augmented with AI

The future of coding therefore is a democratization of coding and developers more and more augmented by A.I. It’s also a natural selection of dozens of programming languages usually monetized by BigTech firms that have their own interests around them.

Cultural forces in technology like cryptocurrencies and blockchain also impact the adoption of certain programming languages. Instead of using Solidity or another specialized language for writing smart contracts, Solana (one of the current competitors to Ethereum) uses Rust. Just last year, 90% of respondents in a software developer survey said they currently use Rust or have in the past.

OpenAI’s Codex is also an interesting example of how no-code coding might be implemented. Basically, OpenAl said that with OpenAI’s Codex, it’s an entirely new way to “write code” in the natural English language.

A computer programmer can now use English to describe what they want their software to do, and OpenAl’s generative Al model will automatically generate the corresponding computer code, in your choice of programming language. This is what we’ve always wanted — for computers to understand what we want them to do, and then do it, without having to go through a complex intermediary like a programming language.

How would we code if we had a functioning brain-computer-interface? Perhaps we would no longer use keyboards and old programming languages. Clearly A.I. is not going to surpass human developers in coding any time soon nor are no-code low-code platforms going to disrupt developers.

Will A.I really be able to help us auto-complete code to work faster and more efficiently? GitHub Copilot is an artificial intelligence tool developed by GitHub and OpenAI to assist users of Visual Studio Code, Neovim, and JetBrains IDEs by autocompleting code. You can check out its website here.

BigTech Will Dominate Future of Programming

Clearly Microsoft and Google are thinking about the future of code a lot. When big companies create their own coding languages it’s also about creating a moat around their ecosystem and propping up their architecture. If they feel that the other languages do not give them the flexibility they need to make their product more useable they can create their own programming languages which has occurred of course many times.

Kotlin and Go are the two most popular languages designed by Google engineers and maintained by opensource community (funded by Google and other companies). Dart is one of the most recent incubations of Google. How BigTech creates and funds coding languages also sounds a bit nefarious in terms of being able to leverage talent pipelines to their own advantages.

Swift is a robust and intuitive programming language created by Apple for building apps for iOS, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Watch. It's designed to give developers more freedom than ever. There are several programming languages that Microsoft has either developed from the ground up, or has implemented major new dialects for. C#, Typescript and C++ come to mind among so many others.

If a BigTech company could create or acquire a major low-code-no-code platform and/or A.I. that makes developers more productive, it could result in a lot of shareholder value and the ability to perhaps create superior products or at least scale their ideas more cheaply. This is why RPA startups that are dominant today, are likely in the near future to be acquired by BigTech. From UiPath to Automation Anywhere, consolidation is likely to favor the few.

Companies big enough to be dominant in Cloud Computing like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Alibaba have a distinct advantage in this regard to mould the future of code to their own advantages and to the advantages of their own unique ecosystems and business models.

With Al-generated code, one can imagine an evolution in every programming tool, in every programming class, and a Cambrian explosion of new software. But so with RPA and No-code tools at scale can we imagine the benefits of coding and software engineering to be facilitated throughout society and innovation to thrive across industries.

A day will come of course when artificial intelligence does indeed surpass human performance in coding and software engineering tasks in certain cases. By the time that happens OpenAI or DeepMind are likely to no longer exist but Google or Microsoft might. This is because its somewhat likely it’s BigTech that’s most likely to be the agent around the future of code and programming languages.

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I’m hoping this Newsletter can help, inform and inspire someone out there.

Thanks for reading!