The new Cobol, the new Bash

Musing, as I do periodically, on what the Next Big Thing in programming will be, I landed on a new (to me) thought.

One of the original design goals of Cobol was English-like nontechnical readability. As access to NLP and AI continues to improve, I suspect we will see a fresh interest in "executable pseudo-code" approaches to programming languages.

In parallel with this, I think we will see a lot of interest in leveraging NLP/AI from chat-bot CUI's in programming command line environments such as the venerable bash shell.

It is a short step from there I think, to a read-eval-print loop for an English-like programming environment that is both the programming language and the operating system shell.

Hmmm....