"The biggest problem with programming is that we don’t agree on what the problem is", says Jonathan Edwards, who is first and foremost a practicing programmer. Dr. Edwards also spends a great deal of time thinking about how to evolve the languages and tools programmers use to solve increasingly complex problems in general purpose computing. He is currently a Research fellow at MIT, and I caught up with him at Emerging Languages Camp 2010 shortly after his talk on Declarative Objects (see the PPT or PDF slides). His thoughts on a potential future direction for general-purpose programming are quite compelling. In a nutshell, Jonathan is thinking about an object-oriented model-view declarative programming world. Discussing this idea, he states, "First, restrict pointers with a new object model that uses nesting and binding. Second, prevent cycles with a new form of dataflow based on the Model-View architecture." Look through the PPT or PDF linked to above, press play, and open your mind a bit. See what you may see. The programming languages rabbit hole is deep. We seem to be hovering at a comfortable position, yet the problems we face will require us to move further down the tunnel to discover new means of algorithmic expression and code design. Jump in.   Enjoy.