Six programming languages I’d like to see (buttondown.email)

Article summary

The article discusses six ideas for new programming languages, including a serious take on a contract-based language, a language with semantic relations, and a language designed around having first-class GUI support. The author also mentions the desire for a better calculator language, a really dynamically-typed language, and a language where everything is a graph. The article explores the potential features and benefits of these languages. The author's goal is to spark interest and discussion about new language ideas.

Main themes

• contract-based languages
• semantic relations
• GUI support
• calculator languages
• dynamically-typed languages
• graph-based languages

What commenters say

• Some programming languages, such as Ada and D, already have design-by-contract features that can be used for formal verification and general-purpose programming. The lack of a free compiler for Ada in the past hindered its adoption. The idea of a contract-based language is not new, but its potential uses beyond formal verification are still being explored. A language with semantic relations could be useful for expressing relationships between functions and data representations. Reactive programming, as seen in tools like Excel and Pluto.jl, can be a powerful feature for interactive computation. Some commenters argue that debugging reactive programming can be a nightmare due to potential side effects, while others believe that a reasonable runtime or compiler can detect and prevent inconsistencies.
• themes": [