content/posts.old/programing-language-vision.md

   1 ---
   2 title: My vision for the Future of Programing Languages
   3 updated: 2021-06-20
   4 lang: en
   5 summary: A description of a fictitious future programing language.
   6 tags:
   7    - tech
   8    - unison
   9    - haskell
  10    - fragnix
  11    - grin
  12 ---
  13
  14 People who know me closer know that I have an obsession with finding the
  15 perfect programing language.
  16
  17 # The Criteria
  18
  19
  20 I would like to have a programing language, that is
  21
  22  * strongly, statically and dependently typed
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  24  * purely functional
  25  * uses immutable, semantic hashed, content-addressed code and dependency management
  26  * and has automatic, static memory management.
  27
  28 Of course what you also always want from a programing language is a nice
  29 community, a rich ecosystem, good tooling and obviously a fast execution, but I
  30 won’t be talking about those here …
  31
  32 ## The Type System
  33
  34 I think in the last years static, strong typing has increasingly become
  35 mainstream. Examples include type annotations for Python, Typescript and Rust.
  36 Of course it is not enough to have static types, they also need to be
  37 sufficiently expressive. For me that means that you at the very least need
  38 Algebraic Data Types.
  39
  40 Still, in this post I am dreaming, and so I would like to have dependent types
  41 (with type erasure).  I know a lot of people are apprehensive of the "dark type
  42 level magic" Haskell offers today. But I am quite convinced that type level
  43 programing will get easier and more intuitive once reasoning on the type level
  44 works exactly the same as on the term level.
  45
  46 One application for which I personally would like good dependent types support
  47 is tracking matrix dimensions at the type level, this is currently possible but
  48 tedious in Haskell. But of course there are lots and lots of other use cases
  49 for dependent types.
  50
  51 ## Purely functional
  52
  53 I wont argue much for this. But in my opinion it is absolutely a must have.
  54 Tracking side effects and having referential stability change how you think
  55 about a program and enable declarative programing.
  56