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It's often hard to tell what information is truly fundamental, and what will age badly. I look at many books of software engineering that were popular in the early 2000s, like The Pragmatic Programmer, Agile Software Development or the Design Patterns book by the gang of 4. Those books aren't taking about technologies that we expected to be superceded in 5 years. And yet, a lot of the text regarding object orientation and design patterns is outdated at best, and outright harmful at worst. One can also look at, say, concurrency. A topic often seen as unimportant in the 90s, but ultimately taught at the lowest level, with mutexes, threads, semaphores and such. Those aren't going away, but how often is concurrent programming all about manually setting mutexes? We use higher order abstractions, but those change too. Many languages are encapsulating this in monads, whether people know their promise implementation is a monad or not. But that's not the only way, and the most popular way can change: Maybe languages in 10 years will be all about continuations and direct styles. Maybe it'll be something else. The fact that in the end, the same basic features from the 80s and 90s will exist at the bottom somewhere isn't that useful for most programmers. And html generation... I was writing UIs before web apps were there. A lot of things that seemed fundamental went away when the browser was embraced. But will the browser live forever, or be superceded? I suspect that it will all get replaced, or be utter legacy, eventually. Will that eventually be 10 years? 30? It's very hard to say what will remain fundamental, and what will not. |
Also, programming languages in 10 years from now will be pretty much the same languages we have today. There might be a newcomer or two, but it will be niche, as incumbents don't really change and only grow.
As a reminder, for people thinking that technologies change too fast, POSIX is still here and as relevant as ever.