10 Hot Programming Trends

Programming trends are driven through greater efficiency, increased customization, and user-friendliness. The upcoming technologies that can deliver one or more of these eclipse the previous generation.

According to cio.com, there are some hot trends that make programming an endlessly fascinating profession. Let’s take a look at some hot trends here.

1. Preprocessors - A preprocessor translates the new code into something old with a rich set of libraries and APIs. People who were fond of dynamic typing made Groovy, a simpler version of Java without the overly insistent punctuation. Those who wished to fix JavaScript made CoffeeScript, a preprocessor that allows them to code, again, without the onerous punctuation.

2. JavaScript MV* frameworks – A long time back, everyone learned to write JavaScript for popping up an alert box or checking to see that the email address in the form actually contained an @ sign. HTML AJAX apps recently have become so sophisticated that only a few people start from scratch. It is much simpler to adopt an elaborate framework and write a bit of glue code for implementing your business logic.

3. CSS frameworks - CSS frameworks like SASS along with its cousins Compass have become popular. These encourage literate, stable coding by providing programming constructs like real variables, nesting blocks, and mix-ins.

4. SVG + JavaScript on Canvas – With the JavaScript layer able to perform similar functions, browser manufacturers and developers are finding better integration with the DOM layer coming from new formats like SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). The SVG and HTML are made up of one big pile of tags which is often easier for Web developers to use.

5. Almost big data (analysis without Hadoop) - Companies like Google or Yahoo keep a track of all of our Web browsing with data files that are measured in petabytes or yottabytes. Many companies have data sets that can readily fit in the RAM of a basic PC. There will be examples where the fast response times of dozens of machines in a Hadoop cloud run in parallel, but most will do quite well by being plugged on to a single machine without the hurdle of coordination or communication.

6. Game frameworks – Game development now means that one can afford the luxury of custom code. Many game developers have given up their pride years ago and use libraries like Unity, Corona, or LibGDX to build their systems.

7. Single-page Web apps - Latest web apps are front ends to large databases comprising of content. Whenever the web app requires information, it takes it from the database and puts it into the local mold with no requirement for to mark up the data with all the Web extras needed to build a Web page.

8. Mobile Web apps – One can make a single HTML app and put it on a website for running on all the platforms. In case of change, you will not require to return to the app store for a quick review of a bug fix. With the HTML layer getting faster and running on faster chips, this approach can compete with native apps in a better manner even on more complex and interactive apps.

9. Android - The reason for the popularity of Android devices could be due to price. Whilst iOS devices come at a hefty price, the Android world is filled with plenty of competition that's producing tablets for as low as one-fifth the price. Hence, saving money is always a motivation. Another reasons could be the effect of open source as anyone can compete in the marketplace.

10. GPU – There was a time that software was simple and the instructions were arranged in a neat way. The CPU used to be the king of the computer as it performed all kinds of heavy lifting. With the coming of video games, they are filled with extensive graphical routines which can run in parallel, the video card runs the show. It’s much easier to invest $500, $600, on a video card. Apart from gamers, computer scientists are also converting many parallel applications to run hundreds of times faster on the GPU.