Predictions in Technology for 2020 - 2025

Data Engineering

Data Engineering as a field should grow for the next 12-18 months, we will see better tooling around data engineering tasks, especially for automated tests.

Distant possibility: Data Engineering could be one of the fields where visual paradigm could actually be helpful, though most likely only to a limited extent, such as high-level routing of the data between nodes.

Rust and Swift

Rust and Swift will be slowly chipping away from Go’s dominance, but won’t overtake it. Go has all the aspects of the popular languages, just like JavaScript, Ruby, or PHP, it’s far from ideal, but easy to pick up, and attracts a lot of attention.

This prediction hinges on the fact that there will be better interoperability between Rust and Go, C, C++ libraries, so that Rust developers can leverage libraries from other languages. Swift will try to follow.

Above the Clouds

We will see further expansion of tools like Zeit, tools that allow teams to work with multiple clouds at the same time. We will see tools that will allow engineers to use tools like Amazon Athena and Google BigQuery interchangeably, and use them for their strengths. We will see a slow rollout that will speed up, as more and more functionality is abstracted away, and engineers don’t think as much about whether they are using Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft Azure.

I expect it to happen segment by segment, it started with FaaS/Lambdas in 2016, and will take over other functions, such as data processing, orchestrations, and so on.

DLT as de-factor Audit and Record-Keeping

DLT (Blockchain) will become a defacto standard for keeping audit logs for record-keeping. The logs in question will be tokenised and hashed, effectively employing cryptographic shredding, which will allow logs to exist, but also to be able to delete any personally identifiable information.

Surge of the Logical Programming

Similar to how Functional Programming surged in 2006-2009, we will see the surge of the Logical Programming, it builds on appetite for decorativeness, and in fact provide more declarative solutions, while also improving on tests. The way programs are written in languages like Prolog are in fact similar to how tests are written.

Prolog itself is unlikely to be popular, in fact, I can expect that languages like Scala will have frameworks which will allow logical programming in it.