Ask HN: What's the next innovation in computer languages?

2 points by aaronsnoswell 13y ago ↗ HN

What's the next innovation in the computer language landscape? - Punch cards - Machine instructions, Assembler - C and native languages - Managed, Interpreted and Garbage Collected systems

What do you envision as the next step in this journey?

3 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 14.5 ms ] thread

frou_dh 13y ago ↗

I'll take a stab:

* Concurrency support at the language level.

* Immutable data structures becoming the default.

Making Clojure (2/2) and Go (1/2) some up-and-comers. Erlang probably deserves some credit, but I'm not familiar with it.

w_t_payne 13y ago ↗

I think that we are only scratching the surface as regards support for static analysis and automated refactoring.

Also, I think that we will start to apply some of the machine learning and statistical pattern recognition techniques that have become so "du jour" recently to programming - enabling development tools to do some really sophisticated things.

drcode 13y ago ↗

I would expect that mixing dynamic & static typing still is an area that could lead to some language breakthroughs.

Dynamic typing is great for exploratory programming and static typing offers additional correctness guarantees.

Some work has been done in Haskell, Clojure and Racket in this direction (allowing static and dynamic types to co-exist) but I think lots more is possible.