From Tim Sweeney - Re: Hundred Year Language

A quote from: Tim Sweeney - Re: Hundred Year Language
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/classic/message6475.html#6501

All the content in this post is a quote about various languages out there.

"C# is a great illustration of the superficiality of popular language progress. It is the most polished and fine-tuned mainstream language ever created, yet fails to come to grips with basic mathematics type and theory. You still have absurdities like 2^64=0, 7/2=3, simple expressions like x/y and a[x] which the compiler accepts yet aren't actually typesafe in any reasonable definition of the term, arrays have serious typing flaws, and the basic confusion between things and references to things remains.

Right now, the open language lineages are:

- LISP: This is the apex of untyped programming with nested scoping and metadata manipulation. It's at the end of the line, not because of lack of potential, but it's so simple and powerful than any improvements to it can be implemented in LISP itself without affecting the core language. In 100 years, after the last C and C++ programmers are long gone, there will still be LISP enthusiasts. But don't expect large-scale software development to happen this way.

- C, C++, Java, C#: The problem nowadays isn't with implementation but with the underlying flaws in the paradigm. We can continue to go the route of adding tweaks as with C#, but they're asymptotically approaching a limit that's not far from the current state of affairs.

- Python, Perl, etc: Languages with significant improvements in usability for certain audiences, and are generally a mix of untyped LISP features with typed C/Java-style features. The primary innovations I see here are in the syntax and libraries, for example Python's pioneering of "pseudocode that runs" and Perl's first-class regular expressions and text parsing capabilities. Future languages will certainly inheret these features, even as the underlying paradigm is changed.

- ML, Haskell, simply-typed functional languages with type deduction and, in general, programs consisting of a whole bunch of top-level declarations. The elegance of these languages is based on Hindley-Milner and with most of the neded extensions of the language (subtyping, dependent types), that breaks, and the resulting declarations and error messages become quite a mess. These languages will certainly remain useful to their current fans, but I see no hope for this style of programming to scale up to mainstream development.

So which lineage will be the basis of languages 100 years from now? I think the syntax has long since been determined, and will fall very much in the middle ground between Haskell, Pascal, and C++ -- and not very much outside that triangle.

Regarding the type system and semantics, I think the basic principles in such mathematical-style code as "f(x:int):int -> if x<=0 then 1 else x*f(x-1)" will not change one iota in 100 years, but that the current notions of objects, references, member functions, exceptions, however-many-bit integers, integer being "the" type of 7, and so on will seem terribly archaic. In this area, I don't think any current lineages will stand.

However, I do think we'll converge on a type system that is not far outside of the past 20 years' research into dependent types, intersection and union types, unification, constraint logic, and proofs-as-programs. These type systems essentially have the expressive power of mathematical logic itself, which is fundamental and not a product of invention or whim.

Alex Peake - Re: Hundred Year Language blueArrow
4/11/2003; 6:44:05 PM (reads: 2820, responses: 0)
IMHO (what counts is Productivity)...
"...most important change...around well-defined type systems..."
Type systems are about bug prevention and early detection, and bugs of the "type mismatch" variety only. Has anyone really studied the cost of early detection vs. productivity loss from not using dynamically typed languages?

"LISP...don't expect large-scale software development to happen this way..."
Why? Why are many fairly inadequate languages more successful than good, powerful languages? It's about 1) Money -- money begets money and Microsoft has a vested interest in maintaining their status-quo of followers, as have the Sun/IBM/Oracle gang as a way of competing with Microsoft. They are the ones with marketing might. They are the ones who communicate the loudest. They are the ones that most "choosers of programming languages" hear. And they are "safe", and
2) the great majority of "choosers of programming languages" are either incapable or uninterested in actually evaluating programming languages.

"...ML, Haskell, (Erlang,) simply-typed functional languages..."
I think the real elegance, and productivity, comes from the declarative style and the pattern matching.

BTW, Smalltalk was conspicuously absent - a wonderfully productive dynamically typed, reflective,... development environment!

Nay, I say, the future is LISP (well Scheme maybe) and Smalltalk (if only someone could afford to Market either). "