I found this a difficult read, and difficult to draw a conclusion from. I think partially because I think the title is quite misleading - it should be "how will languages evolve?".
Also, it's surprising that this article doesn't touch on the Semantic Web; which is clearly one of the initiatives that is key to all of this... Although he does mention the important of ontologies.
Right now I don't buy the premise that we'll just be wiring (mashing) together components in any near future.
Yes, it was a bit longer than necessary to make his point. I think the general point is that programming is more about information and system architecture and less about the details of one particular language. I tend to agree with this view.
I agree that RDF and the semantic web folks are also working on related concepts (as are the PBEL / web-services folks). The programming landscape seems to be changing faster and faster, so I do think that we will end up with several good meta-programming environments in the near future.
Also, it's surprising that this article doesn't touch on the Semantic Web; which is clearly one of the initiatives that is key to all of this... Although he does mention the important of ontologies.
Right now I don't buy the premise that we'll just be wiring (mashing) together components in any near future.