Comment Programming, not programming in a language (Score 1) 177
Programming is a set of thought processes that are being applied regardless of the language or environment being used. The other part is markup or translation, and that part of the work should be minimized.
I've been programming since I was a little kid and now I'm almost 40. In developing my craft over 30 years I've focused on learning how to write solid code that can be easily modified by the next person. The software that you write needs to read like Hemingway: short, simple, and declarative. When you think of programming in terms of languages, you're doing it wrong.
One day we will instruct computer AIs completely in a natural language like English or another language. The more cumbersome the markup and translation, the further you stray from that goal.
Thinking narrowly, there are features of languages that have proven to be useful over time, such as object orientation. The key here though is abstraction. However we do it, the programmers' job is to move electrons around. At every abstraction we should strive to simplify and in my mind I see a convergence such as the natural language interface. To facilitate it we need to think about what it really means to be a programmer, what it has always meant, and what it will always mean: To convey an accurate and modifiable sequence of instructions to some device in the most efficient way possible.