What do you think will be the next big thing in computer programming? X-oriented programming, y language, quantum computers, what?

I don't think we'll see a "big jump". We've seen a lot of tools to help make all the everyday drudgery easier - with high-level languages and perhaps the integration of simple databases into the language being the main ones. But most of the buzz-words have been of pretty limited use.

For example, I personally believe that "Visual Basic" did more for programming than "Object-Oriented Languages" did. Yet people laugh at VB and say it's a bad language, and they've been talking about OO languages for decades.

And no, Visual Basic wasn't a great language, but I think the easy DB interfaces in VB were fundmantally more important than object orientation is, for example.

So I think there will be a lot of incremental improvements, and the hardware improvements will make programming easier, but I don't expect any _huge_ productivity help or revolutions in how people do things.

At least not until you start approaching real AI, and I don't think real AI is going to be anything you will ever "program".

If you had three months to learn one relativly new technology, which one would You choose?

Hmm. I'd really love to do FPGA's, but I've always been too busy to really sit down and start learning. I love the notion of playing with hardware: it's obviously one of the reasons I ended up doing operating systems, since that (along with compilers) is about as close as you can get to playing with the hardware, without actually designing or building it yourself.

What are your favourite tools (operating system, programming/scripting language, text editor, version control system, shell, database engine, other tools you can't live without) and why do you like them more than others?

I actually don't end up having that many tools I work with, and for the many of them I have spent some time of my own to just make them work for me. The OS part is clearly the biggest one, but I've obviously also written my own version control system (git), and the text editor I use (micro-emacs) I've ended up customizing and extending upon too.

Other than those three parts, the only thing I care deeply about is my email reader. I use "pine" - not because it's necessarily the greatest email reader ever, but because I'm used to it, and it does what I need it to do with a minimum of fuzz.