Ask HN: What's something you'd like that programming languages don't do?

7 points by westicecoast32 6 years ago | 12 comments

For example Andrei Alexandrescu likes how much you can do with static if in D however he thinks languages needs to have more powerful reflection.

Jon blow wrote his language so he can both modify the AST during compile time and write compile time rules without writing a plugin

I'd like more errors and warnings to be in a language, such as when I modify array [0] and [2] but not element [1] and extra warnings when I do strange things with a bunch of if's (hard to explain so I'll spare you).

What are yours?

zzo38computer 6 years ago |

I would like setjmp/longjmp with the ability to catch and continue in order to execute cleanup actions. Most programming languages have one or the other, not both. But, consider that A calls B and B calls C, which uses longjmp to return to A, but B has to clean up some resources, it should catch and continue.

Another thing I would like to have is better bitwise manipulation operations. I find the MOR instruction of MMIX is sometimes useful, and so is the ~ operation of INTERCAL. I also thought of a operator which can be like any one of the C operators + or | or ^ since it is assumed the result is the same in all cases (which will be the case if the bitwise AND of the left and right operands will be zero).

I also agree I want to modify the AST during compile time, using macros.

Many modern programming languages lack a GOTO command, but I think that imperative programming languages should have a GOTO command.

Something that I might want to have is something like LLVM with macros added, although LLVM is itself deficient in some ways (e.g. no support for decimal arithmetic, no support for overlapping data with instructions (e.g. reading/writing immediate operands of other instructions), some calling conventions are missing, and you can't make stable undefined values longer than one bit).

For GPU programming, I think to want something like Checkout.

the_hoser 6 years ago |

I'd like a compiled language that feed optimization strategy notes to the editor, so the editor can describe to the programmer what the compiler plans to do to optimize features of your code.

westicecoast32 6 years ago | |

That's a really good idea. That's what I use compiler explorer for but I do it poorly. CC: llvm

yen223 6 years ago |

Algebraic effects is very interesting to me.

A try...catch block allows one to define how an exception is handled within a given block. You can take the same function, and wrap it in a different try...catch block, and have the exception handled in a different manner.

Algebraic effects would allow one to define how a side effect (e.g. database queries, logging, etc) is performed within a given block. You can take the same function, wrap it in a different block, and have its side effects handled differently. You could have Logging effects write out to stdout in tests, and write to Splunk in production code, for example.

This would give a nice language-level, type-safe construct for implementing dependency injection, without the usual kludges of traditional DI frameworks.

karmakaze 6 years ago |

1. Delayed function argument expression evaluation. Only evaluate the argument if the result is consumed.

You can get close using Callable<V>/.call in Java or better with 'lazy' in Kotlin, but I want it to be default behaviour. Even 'let' in Lisp/Clojure is sometimes annoying being eagerly evaluated.

2. 'var' function argument and return types. Basically allow type inference to work through a call stack.

Basically I want F# features to be in more popular languages.

aogl 6 years ago |

I wish I could code in Python and compile down to run natively like C, or even Go. The more I've used the language, the more it just feels natural, but it's so limited in A.)native compilation and distribution, and B.)multithreading/processing just sucks so bad.

qppo 6 years ago |

Tooling in mind, and assume that the language is not the only language in existence. A large part of my career has been spent writing scripts to duct tape together tools from different languages or write custom tools to deal with friction in a development environment.

westicecoast32 6 years ago | |

Could you get a little more into this? I never had to do anything like that since all my workplaces only used 1 language + js

glram 6 years ago |

I'd like a language that allows me to explicitly annotate my code for vectorization/SIMD. Too often compilers aren't able to vectorize efficiently because the heuristics don't detect the opportunity.

westicecoast32 6 years ago | |

I had a thought on this but it's alot of work for one person and IDK if anyone would use my language for that.

I agree tho. I been learning SIMD and the operations it supports are pretty neat

colejohnson66 6 years ago | |

Doesn’t GCC have annotations for that?

7373737373 6 years ago |

(possibly optional) full determinism, serializable threads for mobile agents, recursive sandboxing for running untrusted code