Every programmer is curious about future trends, and I am not the exceptional one. So, today I am sharing the knowledge that I found about future trends of programming. It’s no secret that technology trends move fast and the tools and means for building those technologies constantly evolve. But if you don’t lift your head up every once in a while to look past the next year’s projects, you could end up coding yourself down an inescapable rabbit hole. Read them quickly because the future is changing faster than we know.

TREND 1: Android on every device

When the browser doesn’t win, Android is close behind. Camera designers, threatened by cellphones with good lenses, started putting Android on cameras, so now you can run Instagram on a Nikon. Does that make Nikon a computer company now? Does it even matter?

There are Android refrigerators, car stereos, watches, televisions, even headphones. Some complain that the UI is too complicated because it can do too much, but that’s missing the point. The UI layer can always be simplified. If Android is running underneath, the platform will dominate.

It’s going to get even more complicated. PC manufacturers are looking at the burgeoning tablet world and feeling left out. Their solution is to run Android on Windows and let people use their Android apps on their desktops, too. Some just run the stock Android emulators used by programmers, but others are looking beyond that to create brands like “PC Plus.” Once Android takes over the PC, it may combine with the browser to push Windows native apps into a distant third place for mindshare on the box.

Android on your refrigerator will mean the opportunity to write code for the refrigerator itself, whether it’s an app for displaying kid art, some calorie-counting scold, or a recipe suggestion engine for what’s left inside the icebox. Who knows?

TREND 2: Open source will find new ways to squeeze us

For all of the success of open source stacks like Android, Ubuntu, or MySQL, there remains a sticky problem with finding the revenue to support development. There are plenty of good stories about how open source code has helped hackers, but there aren’t very many examples of how companies built a relatively stable ecology that lets the programmers buy health care or food.

The vast majority of open-source companies distribute what might better be called a demonstration version under an open-source license. Then some kind of secret sauce is kept locked away to give the programmers something to bargain with. It’s the way of the world. Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free? The best open source projects will find a way to tighten the screws in a comfortable way without scaring away customers.

TREND 3: WordPress Web apps will abound

It’s the biggest mistake if someone trying to build websites from scratch. No one does that anymore. Why bother when you can add a plug-in to WordPress? If you’re really picky, you could work with Joomla or Drupal. The point isn’t really which platform, just the fact that there are fewer and fewer reasons to create your own Web apps because so much functionality is built into the dominant frameworks.

The game gets even more interesting when you start hacking the code. WordPress has its own editor built into it, so you can do your development inside WordPress, too. There’s no debugger, but you can get around that. If WordPress adds a nice database browser like PHPMyAdmin and provides a bit of basic debugging tools, the development will really accelerate.

TREND 4: Plug-ins will replace full-fledged programs

Basic Web apps aren’t the only ones riding the power of code snippets that can be plugged into a bigger framework. Photoshop used to be the dominant engine for reworking images, in part because of the fertile world of plug-ins. Now the newer apps like MagicHour have made plug-ins even simpler. MagicHour users, for instance, can share filters just like they share photos. Most major platforms offer a good plug-in API, and the ones with the best have fertile ecologies filled with thousands of modules, libraries, and plug-ins.

This burgeoning ecology for code means that programmers will write more snippets and fewer applications. The right bit of glue code can be a million times more powerful than a great, hand-built application with megabytes of a binary file. A small snippet can leverage everything in the entire ecology. A big app must do everything on its own.

The savvy programmers will learn to leverage this by creating plug-ins, not programs. They’ll learn the APIs for the host systems and string together parts. Very few will ever build anything from scratch.

TREND 5: JavaScript for everything

No, JavaScript won’t be the only language in the programming world. JavaScript is inescapable on the browser, which now dominates almost everything a client computer does. Now the server side is embracing it with tools like Node.js.

JavaScript will assuredly become more dominant in other areas as well. Once the only way into a smartphone was to write code in the native language demanded by the manufacturer: Objective-C for the iPhone; Java for Android; C# for Microsoft. Now, most mobile developers can get the performance they want out of HTML5 applications running in browser-like views. The result may not be as zippy as native code, but the JavaScript is good enough and portable to the Web, too.

The browser isn’t just colonizing phones; it’s eating entire platforms. Chrome OS and Chromebooks are making regular operating systems obsolete. Why worry about that layer when JavaScript and the browser can do everything?  The mainframe will have Cobol. Biologists will probably stick with Python. Linux will be written in C. But almost everything else is fair game as JavaScript gobbles the world.