41–50 of 182 posts
To me what matters the most isn't the language but the ecosystem: - versatility: create desktop apps, mobile apps, websites, CLI - quality of IDE / tooling - lots of libraries to deal with all sort of corner problems - lots of knowledge I can google - if used professionally: lots of talents available For the language itself, I only really care about one thing: statically typed, just because it eliminates all sort of…
In the bulk of the code I want the syntax to be as terse as possible so the business logic is as clear as possible even if it comes at a perf cost. This is where Rust often fails. The logic of something where I don’t care about perf is obscured by token salad for Box’es and similar.
Let's take an example of Scala. Great language for most business domain problems: easy to write expressive, bug-free and concurrent code. What enables those strengths also enables its weaknesses: steep learning curve, a lot of ways to reduce boilerplate which increase complexity of codebase, powerful type-system to prevent bugs/invalid states - you have to deal with "type gymnastics" and slower compilation times
So future Rust.
Ruby with python style type hints
What is your thoughts on Crystal?
But generally speaking, after 14 years of Ruby... and also trying many more languages - I do know what I want. It's not speed. It's not memory safety. It's not paradigms. It's not static or dynamic typing. It's not the packages and the community. Nope.
I want easy code navigation. I only currently know of one language, that hasn't even been fully released yet, that achieves this task to a degree. But even then, it's only 30% there.
Secondly, it would be as easy to program in as Python but have some way to be more efficient when that was strictly necessary. Might be JIT or the ability to embed a lower level language or some kind of type hints that made it more efficient or who knows. One wouldn't need to spend too much time on crap like "build systems" or package management or whatever to make it work.
Thirdly: It would work very well with concurrent/asynchronous situations and have powerful abstractions for them like channels, continuations etc that would make them as simple as they could be.
// comments would be my perfect language, write good documentation And leave the coding mostly over to CoPilot, or another AI. Although one needs to understand coding, we should work at a higher level. If you cannot write a good CoPilot prompt, i wouldn't accept you as colleague, if you cannot describe code your unable to properly write your own thoughts, makes you a team disaster. The language itself thus becomes le…
Minimalist languages face their own challenges, the Lua mailing list is besieged by people who love the minimalism of it and only want to put in just one little feature that would make it perfect for them. If there wasn't a strong filter, it would have hundreds of those little features and not be so minimal anymore.
Anyway, tooling is great, but what I want to see most of all is simplicity, and not simplicity in the sense of Go, with masochistic manual error handling and all that imperative boilerplate. I'd like simplicity like Scheme or SML, omitting what isn't needed or can be relegated to a library. With great tooling, of course.
So, what I most of all want is for SML to become popular. Which isn't going to happen. So all I can do is to argue for replacing C++ with Rust at work (there's not much resistance actually, more than finding resources to do the actual work, which is problematic).
Anyway, I have fooled around with making my own language, but I don't think it's a good idea anymore (but damn would it be good if there was a modern SASL, think Scheme with ML syntax[0]). Because you correctly identified that it's tooling that is the decider these days. So if you want to make a difference, find an underappreciated language that is close enough to your ideal (there will be several, unless you have really wild ideas) and put in work on tooling for it instead.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150402133901/http://www.eis.md...
To me what matters the most isn't the language but the ecosystem: - versatility: create desktop apps, mobile apps, websites, CLI - quality of IDE / tooling - lots of libraries to deal with all sort of corner problems - lots of knowledge I can google - if used professionally: lots of talents available For the language itself, I only really care about one thing: statically typed, just because it eliminates all sort of…
My perfect language is also C#!