[draxil]

Less different than you'd think I'd say. All my career people think programming is on the verge of some major shift to managers just drawing diagrams or something.. But of course that never happens.

I think the most important change in the last twenty years has been the full acceptance of TDD. Maybe we'll get to everyone recognising continuous delivery or something like that as essential..

I'm sure there'll be a new "it" language threatening to displace the by-then majority use of go and rust. Meanwhile some carefully maintained C will still be keeping the lights on, and some poor (but well paid) individual will still be keeping some COBOL running.

[rtcoms]

If a new language/framework comes which can generate factorues and test cases, that may be game changing.

That will basically introduce a decent coding practices for even a junior developer, something like Rails convention over Configuration.

Major difference is quality of work I see is the amount of test coverage, because a good test coverage helps you to change code much mode confidently.