With the embarrassment of riches in the low level programming language space (Zig, Jai, Odin, Beef, V, Jakt, Val, Rust?), I was thinking about what the next high level programming language might look like...
It's got to be open source and have super support for the web. IMHO it should support regular programming as well as interactive (i.e. shell) use. It ought to be fully reactive!
Simply, "reactivity" makes programming more like spreadsheets. Though the flapjax project did this with javascript many years ago, all the hot new javascript frameworks are finally adopting this kind of approach (svelte, solidjs, vue). It's good for GUIs, and it could be great for programming in the general. Imagine View Source for all of programming!
As long as we're talking "high level", it could have all sorts of cool features thrown in, like transparent persistence, CALM consistency support, easily querying JSON and other formats. Implementing features takes a lot of engineering effort however. That's a big lesson from Zig's increasing success: engineering matters a lot. Tangentially, here're a few links in praise of Zig engineering:
- It compiles c better than traditional c compilers do, for a while now actually.
- It's easier to debug than c++, in nerdy ways.
- It will be able to do fancy fast compilation, by virtue of careful use of its complexity budget. If you're curious, see here.
