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Next-Paradigm Programming Languages: What Will They Look Like and What Changes Will They Bring?

January 1, 2019
RelationalAI

What will be the common principles behind next-paradigm, high-productivity
programming languages, and how will they change everyday program development?

Author: Yannis Smaragdakis. 2019.

In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas,
New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward! ‘19).

The dream of programming language design is to bring about orders-of-magnitude
productivity improvements in software development tasks. Designers can endlessly
debate on how this dream can be realized and on how close we are to its
realization. Instead, I would like to focus on a question with an answer that
can be, surprisingly, clearer: what will be the common principles behind
next-paradigm, high-productivity programming languages, and how will they change
everyday program development? Based on my decade-plus experience of heavy-duty
development in declarative languages, I speculate that certain tenets of
high-productivity languages are inevitable. These include, for instance,
enormous variations in performance (including automatic transformations that
change the asymptotic complexity of algorithms); a radical change in a
programmer’s workflow, elevating testing from a near-menial task to an act of
deep understanding; and a change in the need for formal proofs.

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Next-Paradigm Programming Languages: What Will They Look Like and What Changes Will They Bring?