For pedantry, should we note that design by contract came all the way from Eiffel ?
(But it's possible that even less people ever wrote Eiffel than D, so, who knows)
A few good ideas in programming languages
11–20 of 63 posts
Re: A few good ideas in programming languages
#12I feel like languages are playing around different paints if coat mostly, and not trying to build more meaningful programming experiences.
I'd love to see a language whose pitch is that they have very next level stdlibs builtin. Effect for example is basically a mini stdlibs unto itself. It would be amazing to see such a principled deliberate craft applied to a language. Scope, layers etc etc etc etc: make visible, make first-class the actual pieces of computing, make them part of the language, explicitly modelled.
I'm also super excited for Zena, which just got announced yesterday! A typescript alike that compiles to wasm, and which really leans in to modern wasm, such as gc, wasi. A language that sits well at the cross-roads, that is excellent glue, that runs anywhere, that bridges other languages, is very compelling. https://justinfagnani.com/2026/09/09/zena-a-new-wasm-first-p...
Re: A few good ideas in programming languages
#13A genuine question: is the first point (flow typing / type narrowing) a subset of or intersection with or just an alias to SSA (static single assignment)? I'm playing with a small interpreted language implementation that is based on Lua, and have reached a point where I want to implement a single-pass SSA (there is a nice short CS paper on this), but cannot get my head around all the concepts, even if I need proper SSA for Typescript-like usability.
Re: A few good ideas in programming languages
#14> Borrow Checking
It's very confusing name for this feature. It suggest that some sort of borrowing takes place and that it's just an optional check, which isn't the case. It should be named something like "enforced static usage analysis" instead.
In my programming language I have similar mechanism. But it isn't just checking, since it affects code generation by tracking which variables are still in use and which can be destroyed.
Re: A few good ideas in programming languages
#15A genuine question: is the first point (flow typing / type narrowing) a subset of or intersection with or just an alias to SSA (static single assignment)? I'm playing with a small interpreted language implementation that is based on Lua, and have reached a point where I want to implement a single-pass SSA (there is a nice short CS paper on this), but cannot get my head around all the concepts, even if I need proper S…
SSA = static single assignment?
I am confused
Re: A few good ideas in programming languages
#16How does contract programming differ from refinement types?
The contract programming in D is pretty much syntactic sugar for placing asserts at different parts of your program. Refinement types can be used as compile time checks for preconditions and postconditions, while this contract programming is inserting runtime checks. Here's a good post on the type state pattern in Rust (we don't actually have refinement types in something like Rust but the type state pattern is somew…
In D, the covariance/contravariance of contract inheritance is an important aspect of the contracts.
Re: A few good ideas in programming languages
#17Have there been any new good ideas in programming languages since LLMs came around? Or are we over that now..
Re: A few good ideas in programming languages
#18Have there been any new good ideas in programming languages since LLMs came around? Or are we over that now..
Programming language innovation is measured in decades. I expect LLMs will make it easier to prototype new concepts, but adoption will still progress on a human timescale
Re: A few good ideas in programming languages
#19Completely free flow typing is risky in terms of interpretability, but type narrowing - var a : supertype; if (a is subtype) { // a is known to be subtype }, or type case, saves boilerplate in any OOP language.
Re: A few good ideas in programming languages
#20Have there been any new good ideas in programming languages since LLMs came around? Or are we over that now..
Programming language innovation is measured in decades. I expect LLMs will make it easier to prototype new concepts, but adoption will still progress on a human timescale
The marketing pitch for these things was that they were supposed to induce "cambrian explosion of creations". That there was zero barrier to building anything anymore. This is surely true in programming languages especially, considering how fast LLMs took over software development? Surely this would mean we would get new ideas faster if that was the case? There is literally nothing stopping language designers from getting new concepts out there now even if nobody is using them in production yet.
> LLMs will make it easier to prototype new concepts,
So where are these prototypes?