Those were among the questions posed to a group of language and programming experts at the Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference) here.

Gilad Bracha, Anders Hejlsberg, Douglas Crockford, Wolfram Schulte and Jeremy Siek made up the distinguished panel of computer language designers and researchers addressing "The Future of Programming Languages." And the moderator was no slouch either. Erik Meijer, a Microsoft software architect and language expert in his own right, moderated the panel. Meijer was influential in the evolution of the Haskell language and is the leader of Microsoft's "Volta" project to simplify Web and cloud development.

The panel touched on a wide variety of issues, not only including identifying the most pressing issues facing developers, but also such topics as whether IDEs (integrated development environments) matter more than languages, whether modeling is important, the degree to which programmers should be allowed freedom with the language and the inevitable dynamic language versus static language debate.

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