A language wish list

drmaciver.com

15 points·luu··7 comments

Let me add in autocomplete and, if applicable, import management.

Also...

> Higher order functions ... no mainstream languages that don’t do this.

Go doesn't, vehemently so. A higher order function, such as map, must be generic, and Go simply doesn't see the need for that. Write more for loops :(

> autocomplete

Isn't that an editor's job?

It is a shared responsibility. The language must allow you to create a sane in-memory representation of code, including partial code, and an autocomplete engine has to be created, taking advantage of that.

> Go doesn't, vehemently so.

We seem to have a different notion of what a higher order function is. My understanding is that a higher order function is one that takes one or more functions as arguments, or, returns one or more functions as a result.

Go happily supports this.

The author of the article specifically calls out map and reduce.

Go does not support higher order functions in nearly the same way as functional languages.

I think we need more languages with syntactical significant whitespace.

I did a few projects with LiveScript and it felt like a different world. These dangling delimiters, end or even } and ], just feel like a burden now.

I'd love to have a language that just get stored as abstract syntax tree, so everyone could adjust their syntax as they please. But there are just things that are nicer to write with special syntax's. And stuff that got written with SSW could look rather ugly if viewed with {} or ends. But it would probably be a nice experiment :)

Sounds like he wants clojure.

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