You’re sitting down, basking in the glow of your computer monitor. Suddenly, a magical blue beam comes down from the sky and zaps you right on top of your head. It has a cooling, tingling feeling and then a bright blue light flashes before your eyes.

*ZAP*

You find yourself transported back to year 2000 in front of your Pentium 3 (or G3 Mac?) again, with no memory of the future where you came from.

“Oh oh!”

You see a new ICQ message on your monitor. Its from a mysterious person telling you that in the year 2007,

1. The Mac is going to steal developer mind-share from Windows, and you’ll also see a lot of “I deploy on Linux, but develop on a Mac” people.
2. Ruby is going to be one of the top 10 programming languages.
3. JavaScript is going to be one of the most important programming languages.
(3 statements above from Global Nerdy)
4. Flash is going to win the video streaming war and it’ll be the core technology used by a company that gets acquired by Google for US$1.65 billion. RealPlayer and all the others? Sunk into relative obscurity.
5. Java will be languishing as a language for desktop application AND client-side web development.
6. Perl isn’t cool anymore. None of the Cool Kids seem to learn or use it.

Would you have believed it? Or maybe even call it stupid? Those 6 points above really illustrate how unpredictable the software world can be.

I believe that in the next few years, the number of web sites devoting to the tastes of Alpha Geeks will increase considerably. In the past, we had sites like Slashdot. Now, we have sites like Reddit and Digg, which allows interesting new ideas, programming languages and paradigms to propogate through the entire community a lot faster than ever before.

As a result, the growth in mindshare for fringe technologies that are actually good, will increase dramatically.

So that everyone can laugh at me when I get it wrong in 2014, here are my bets for the changes that will be coming up for the next 7 years.

1. The Mac will get 20% marketshare of the global personal computer/laptop market. This segment of the market will also be the part that really matters to developers - the type that will actually upgrade their computers and buy after-market software. This will have a huge impact on the consumer software developers worldwide as cross-platform functionality can no longer be ignored.

2. Java will no longer dominate as the de-facto server-side programming language in enterprise projects and its importance in academia will be significantly reduced. Erlang, Python and Ruby (for web shops) will hit the mainstream consciousness and replace Java for server-side programming tasks. Python will get introduced in the curriculum of universities to replace Java as the main instructional language.

3. Client-side programming will be dominated by hybrid-apps. Many more apps will use Javascript/HTML/CSS/etc for front-end work and adopt a hybrid approach of using Python (or maybe even Lua) for the bulk of the code, and only leaving some portions in C/Objective-C/C++.

4. Functional programming languages will (finally) hit the consciousness of the mainstream developer. Functional programming will be taught to first-year computer science students.

It’ll sure be interesting to see which of these things I get right or hopelessly wrong in 2014! Here’s hoping this site even exists at that time. :-)