Over 10 years ago, I had this sort of a prediction that, with the massive adoption of a dynamic language like javascript on both client/server sides and test-driven development gaining a lot of ground, the future of programming would be dynamic and “feedback-driven”. As in, you would immediately see the results of your code as you type, based on the tests you created. To naively simplify, imagine a split screen of your code editor and a console view showing relevant watch expressions from the code you’re typing.

Instead what happened was the industry’s focus shifted to type safety and smart compilers, and I followed along. I’m just not smart enough to question where the whole industry was heading. And my speck of imagination on how coding would have looked like in the future wasn’t completely thought out. It was just that, a speck of imagination that occurred to me as I was debugging something tedious.

Now, most of the programming language world, seem to be focusing on smarter compilers. But is there some language or platform, that focus instead on a different kind of programming paradigm (not sort of OOP, FP paradigm, may be call it the programming workflow paradigm?). May be it comes with a really strong debugger tooling that’s constantly giving you feedback on what your code is actually doing. Think REPL on steroids. I can imagine there would be challenges with parsing/evaluating incomplete code syntax and functions. So I guess, the whole compiler/translator side has to be thought out from the ground up as well.

Disclaimer: There’s a good chance I simply don’t know what I’m talking about because I’m no language designer or even close to understanding how programming languages and it’s ecosystems are created. Just sharing some thoughts I had as a junior dev back in the day.

  • @[email protected]
    5•11 months ago

    I can imagine there would be challenges with parsing/evaluating incomplete code syntax and functions. So I guess, the whole compiler/translator side has to be thought out from the ground up as well.

    What I always found kind of strange in this regard, is that many of the scripting languages (Python, JS etc.), which are good for this workflow, decided to be extremely loose on the syntax front.

    Compilers love semicolons and scope braces, because whenever you encounter one, you know what you just parsed is supposed compile. And if it doesn’t compile, you can easily narrow down that location and still reason about the rest.

    In a REPL, you could potentially tell the user that you don’t yet know what velocity is, because that doesn’t compile, but the result of the remaining calculations is going to be 6.28 * velocity.