i do think though that matlab suffers from the thing that most powerful tools suffer from after many years of evolution towards more powerful scripting, which is that the underlying language is not quite up to par with a full clean well designed oop language. ... in other words, i predict that in 10 years i suspect that programs will not have their own little languages.
in 10 years when you buy a tool like matlab, microsoft office, firefox, whatever - they will all use a standardized interface for scripting.
-mouser
The underlying language of MATLAB is C*, and advanced users could write really advanced stuff as a C library instead, but this doesn't seem to come up much.
I don't think we'll see a generalization of scripting languages--for example, MATLAB is syntactically refined to be an excellent language for programming numerical algorithms, down to details like myvector(end) (shortcut for last element) and myvector(1:2) = [] (shortcut to remove first two elements from the vector).
Similarly, Perl is the greatest thing in the world for messing around with text files and strings, and its syntax, particularly with the simple use of regexes, seems geared to that.
I think the best example of a general-purpose scripting language that interfaces with many applications is AppleScript, which I'm not very familiar with, but sounds closest to mouser's prediction. VBA is similar, though limited mostly to Microsoft apps. But I don't see these replacing, just augmenting, existing scripting interfaces. If nothing else, the group of people who might be called "non-dedicated programmers" for whom programming is only a part of what they do will have a resistance to the changes that would lead to the loss of their favorite niche language.
Okay, I'm just rambling now. My original point was that the OP (not mouser, the blog poster) seems to either dismiss or ignore graphical programming environments, notably LabView, as failed attempts. While LabView (in particular) has not seen broad acceptance by programmers, this probably has more to do with typecasting--in the acting sense--not as a general purpose language, but as a data acquisition language, no doubt because (1) that was its original purpose, and (2) National Instruments uses LabView primarily as a way to sell DAQ cards. Thus, programmers, even those with access to LabView, often don't consider it for other tasks which it is perhaps just as well suited for. It's a shame because it's an extremely rapid application development environment. If only it weren't so expensive...
* The IDEs of MATLAB 6 and above are written in Java, and the language has access to the JRE, though I'm not exactly sure how to do this, as it too has never come up.
