What are the trends in programming?

Question

Programming

In general, the situation is this - I am a schoolboy, in a year I will be a student. I want to go to study as a programmer, well, I myself am still learning slowly and go to courses. And now I read about different directions, I try everything - I try to understand what exactly I like the most and, as a student, already try to look for work in a specific area. But there is not enough systematization of knowledge about the directions in programming. Therefore, I will be very grateful if the programmers help to compile a more or less complete list of areas with brief descriptions. To shorten the search area, I will write about which areas I would like to know first:
1. Embedded systems. How promising is this? I saw an opinion on one forum that embedded will become less popular in the future, although I don’t think so myself - after all, these are smartphones, and robots, and ip cameras, and much more
2. Virus analytics. More recently, this direction came into my field of vision. I would just like to learn more about the skills and knowledge that a virus analyst needs and about what related areas exist.
3. Encryption, cryptography, DSP. How practical is learning these things? I mean, in order to work in a large company, and not in some research institute.
4. Search for vulnerabilities on websites (and in general it can be, for example, in online games, etc.). In particular, I try to find XSS, so far I have not found it on any large site, only on a couple of not very well-known sites
5. Functional programming. Well there, Haskell, Erlang. On the one hand, I saw many articles in which this same Haskell and FP were generally praised, and I myself like their ideas, but many people think that in theory they are good, but in practice you won’t get anywhere with them. Is it so bad? And yet, in what specific directions is the use of FL really justified?
In general, I’m also interested in low-level programming, picking with hardware (I’m friends with a soldering iron, I know how to crimp :) I’ll make a reservation right away, the
development of mobile applications and the frontend on the web is not particularly interesting. Well, all sorts of 1Cs.
Regarding experience and skills:
Python (I wrote a program to automatically configure the ip -camera, now I am writing a program to send video from the camera to the server, while simultaneously dealing with Django in order to write the server part for this program) worm - exclusively for (self) educational purposes, I will not distribute)
Pascal / Delphi (wrote a program-translator from English into Russian, which took words and their translation from a text file and another one - a multiple-choice test that takes questions and answers from a text file that asks the user for the last name and first name, calculates the score and writes the last name, result and date to another file - but that was a long time ago, now Pascal somehow abandoned it)
Slowly started learning fasm under Linux, superficially familiar with HTML/CSS, very superficially with JavaScript.
I almost forgot - first of all, free technologies are interesting - therefore, .NET and Flash, for example, are not very attractive. But this is not the most important criterion.
PS Initially, I wanted to ask for a more general list of directions, but it turned out that in the process of formulating the question I realized that asking to list all the directions in general is too impudent, so I tried to determine in which areas I would like to know the most.

Answer 1

embedded - these are microcontrollers, industrial equipment .... such things. Smartphones are no longer included in this category. Here you need a good understanding of how hardware, C, assembler and all that stuff works. There are less and less good specialists in this field every year
virus analytics - no idea, but I understand that you should have a good understanding of how to write these same viruses. Let's say try writing a test virus using polymorphic code. At the same time, you will figure out how to work with the flow of instructions at runtime ... a rather entertaining thing ... but to be honest, I never understood this layer at one time.
Encryption, cryptography... sooner or later in any direction you will encounter at least basic things. At a minimum, you will hear all sorts of things like SHA12, RSA, SSL, etc. whatever you end up working with (unless embedded has less than that, although I can't say for sure).
As for functional programming... it's a programming paradigm, along with procedural and object-oriented programming. It seems to be not tied to the direction of development. Moreover, a lot of languages ​​combine all these paradigms or make it possible to write in the style you want (for example, PHP, Haskel, Pyhon, Java since version 8 seems to support lambda calculations) ...
In short... just do what interests you. Programming languages, technologies, etc. are selected based on the task that seems interesting to you. Yes, and moving from one area to another is relatively easy, especially when you are not yet burdened with caring for your family and children.
Well, good specialists will always be in demand.

Answer 2

With examples
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqcSTBWD9JI