Modern Language Wishlist

Modern Language Wishlist
lispcast.com

Anyway, no love for type inference or generic?

I may be influenced by the fact i'm into Go at the moment, but i think it covers most of the "features" he talks about, as well as many of the "libraries" (some may not be part of the standard library, but will be available through 3rd party packages). If the author is reading this, I encourage him to have a good honest look at http://golang.org/

I don't know if i like his discussion of "math-oriented types" vs. "machine-oriented types". At least as far as I see it (and according to wikipedia[1]), in maths whole integers (Z) are a subset of rational numbers (Q). When in your high-school maths class you say 3 + 2.5 = 5.5, you're really doing an implicit conversion to 3.0 + 2.5 = 5.5 or 3/1 + 5/2 = 11/2. Most languages allow you to also get rid of the bit-size of numbers by just defining "int" or "float" numbers that default to some predetermined bit-width (e.g. 32-bit). Most languages also have libraries or mechanisms (see Go and Python) for large precision numerical calculation so you can have your theoretically infinite size "no-overflow" situation; but that comes at the cost of speed, so we only use these types when it is specifically needed. It's not impossible to use them in all cases, but it is impractical.

In the end, a language can't do everything. Most languages focus on providing a good core, along with mechanism for users to extend functionality in any way they see fit. In this case I think the author wants the language to just do everything for him out of the box, without any pesky libraries, and without being bloated or slow. _That_ most certainly _is_ impossible. There is a good reason why no language implements _all_ of these "features".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_(mathematics)

Ed: Z is a subset of Q.

>(plus libraries)

So some of this would belong as a language feature and other stuff would be in the standard library (is what I'm imagining at least).

I'm a Cocoa guy, and when a lot of people rave about Objective-C, they usually are referring to niceties Cocoa provides. This is sort of what I was imagining as I read along.