In one of my last news positings the question arose for me what is the "big thing" after C++. Actually the question was wrong, or at least I asked it in a too little scope. The better question is "Object orientation and then?"
Giving an answer to this kind of question is nothing more than guesswork and I am surely not able to give a satisfying answer. Since object orientation is _the_ paradigm used in programming presently it's hard to imagine what's coming next. One way to find an answer is to ask what could be wrong with OO? I don't want to summarize what a number of people have already said. The interested person can have a look at books like "Generative Programming" or "Software Factories".
What's on the mind of people like Charles Simonyi, Andy Evans or Sergey Dmitriev - just to name a few - seems to be a thing called language oriented programming. Others might call it MDSD or Generative Programming. But the names don't matter. The central concepts that people talk about are always comparable.
The consensus is that developers won't be creating _programs_ for the rest of the time. Instead poeple - like those that have been mentioned - envision a paradigm where will create _languages_. These languages will be tailored to very specific application domains. Thus the term domain specific language - or DSL. Using DSLs "users" (stakeholders of the domains) will then be enabled to create there own applications. The advantage of this approach is that the abstraction level of the DSLs is much closer to the one in which the users think - which makes it much easier to create programs.
Now you might ask: Is language creation not a task for real hardcore guru developers? And the answer is: It depends ;-) First and for most it depends of course on the complexity of the domain that is to be covered. Secondly it depends on the ability of the developer to understand the needs of the customer and on his ability to adopt the customers vocabulary. The technical side - and this is what I am sure about - is not so important, because other people - for instance the persons mentioned above - have already thought about the tools.
Honestly - which developer can resist the temptation to package functionality, he or she is writing for one app, into a "framework", hmm? This happens every day and often in cases where not even a little bit of information about requirements for the single app is known. But the will of the developer to create a framework is there. At last a framework is also a kind of a domain specific language because the components are the terminals and non-terminals and the intended usage provides the production rules of the syntax of this language. So, to answer the question which developer creates a language: Every one will try to.
