Predicting 50 Years of Compiler Research -- They Can't Be Serious

Reference: Hall, M., Padua, D., and Pingali, K. (2009). Compiler Research: The Next 50 Years, Communications of the ACM 52:2, 60-67.

I was amused to read the title of the CACM article referenced above. One can't quibble with the tag line -- "research and education in compiler technology is [sic] more important than ever." The article starts out well enough, recounting the past 50 years of compiler advances and noting that in the coming decade, research into compiling for multi-core processing and security and reliability will be major challenges. And it's hard to critique the authors' agenda for the compiler community except that it's rather vanilla and based on current conditions and those easily foreseeable for the near future, such as the need to address parallel architectures. But, it's completely unreasonable to expect that anyone can predict now what our needs will be in 50 years. For example, it seems likely that we will need compilers for quantum computing, yet this possibility is not raised. It's also quite likely, especially if you believe Ray Kurzweil, that by then computers rather than people will be building software, implying an entirely different model for the role of people, if at all, in compiler creation.