1–10 of 132 posts
I do wonder how it'd be designed, maybe current approach sucks?
OOP is beautiful itself, it *enables normal people* to model complex systems that'll be running on computers, but can we get even better?
Essentially all modern languages were designed by people who were good enough programmers to implement compilers/interpreters/runtimes in a language like C, so it's hard to avoid some intellectual crossover. You'd need to have a separate team implementing the design proposed by this outsider.
A good starting point is the video, 50 in 50, by Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel. It reviews 50 programming languages from the first 50 years of computing.
I could see the appeal of something like voice and copilot.
The good: Excel, Dataflow Diagrams (commonly found in game, music and arts), SQL, Declarative Dataflow Paradigms in general. Mutablity is counterintuitively counterintuitive if you don't have a model of the underlying execution system.
The weird: Prolog, APL, languages done by mathematicians and logicians
The ugly: SPSS, R, two languages done by statisticians, and they are absolutely abhorrent, and often missused.
If we reinvented programming today my guess is that it would be a lot less text driven and a lot more data oriented.
Most people I work with who are non-programmers but who could benefit from coding spend a lot of their working life in Excel. When we teach them SQL and give them access to our data warehouse, a lot of the time the explanations that stick are thinking of it like a big spreadsheet with lots of pages and columns/rows. Spreadsheets are fundamentally very visual, and have few abstractions to get your head around before you can start work. (There have been "visual programming languages", but these often look like graph editors and I think that's a complex enough abstraction that it complicates the process).
From this we've then seen a whole load of tools that are trying to be "smarter" spreadsheets. Things like Airtable. Is it a spreadsheet? Is it a database? Is it a no-code application? Is it a project management system? Is it a calendar? Well, yes. Retool, and others also fit into this. They all have a lot of spreadsheet like functionality.
50 years ago, these people were quite common. There were only mathematicians and engineers, but programmers didn't exist yet. The good: Excel, Dataflow Diagrams (commonly found in game, music and arts), SQL, Declarative Dataflow Paradigms in general. Mutablity is counterintuitively counterintuitive if you don't have a model of the underlying execution system. The weird: Prolog, APL, languages done by mathematicians a…
COBOL was supposed to be just that. It is not considered a nice or beautiful language generally.