OT: Language for the ages

One thing that everyone seems to assume is that in 30 years, the general-purpose personal computer will still be around as such. I'm not so certain of this. For those with the current issue of EETimes, take a look at the "Teardown" feature--it's the anatomy of the new Tiger Electronics handheld game box. A 400 MHz ARM processor, many megabytes of flash, USB, Nvidia graphics chip, GPS, Bluetooth and a whole bunch of other stuff all packed into a battery-powered hand-held TOY. It might be that decades from now, we have purpose-built tools with computers buried in their innards (such as the PIC in my trackball) and nary a general-purpose user-programmable PC anywhere. After all, it's a good thing from a marketing standpoint if the user of a system has to buy the programming. Look at the hoops you'd have to jump through to write a new game for your Xbox... Cheers, Chuck