Perspective on Computational Logic

Abstract

The art of programming is going to be altered in radical ways in the next 20 years. Programming, as we know it today, will become the activity of more users and of fewer “programmers” by 2010. Computational Logic will have to fit in a wider context. For applications programming, and to some extent system programming, the context is likely to be the following: applications will mainly become cooperative and distributed, and distribution will be transparent to the programmer; parallelism will be hidden; programming will rely on libraries of reusable objects, both for code and data structures, with well defined application programming interfaces, supported by powerful CASE systems; applications will be written by combining existing modules, extending and specializing them; powerful event-based languages, the so-called scripts, workflow, or rule-based languages, will provide the “programming power”; the libraries and the event languages will depend on application domains; this will generalize the spirit of 4th Generation languages; examples of such languages will be Office Procedure Languages, Resource Management Languages, Business Analysis Languages, etc.This evolution is underway, through the convergence of research in programming languages, databases, artificial intelligence, object-based technology, through the emergence of distributed systems, software engineering, and the influence of all the bodies working on standards for open systems.