Ask HN: A new paradigm in programming languages?

3 pointsljw10013 comments

Looking back, it seems to me that there hasn't been a new, and important, paradigm in (general purpose) programming languages in the past 30+ years.

Looking back, I think of the major paradigms as procedural (C, Pascal), Object (Smalltalk), Functional (LiSP), and Logic (Prolog). These are all at least 35 years old. Have I missed something or have we stuck in a period of refinement to existing models?

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Not really, if you're not considering deep learning techniques as a new programming paradigm.

There isn't an endless supply of useful new paradigms to be discovered. It's a finite number which varies across different domains. We may have simply discovered all the useful approaches lying in the domain of 'languages to be used for general purpose programming by human beings'.

I haven't seen much that would make me call 'deep learning' a general purpose programming paradigm. Seems more like a niche.

You could argue that C was 10x better than Assembly, and maybe that, i.e., Haskell/LISP is 10x better than C (which I don't think it is; more like 2-5x better).

But what could be 10x better than Haskell/LISP?

This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_synthesis

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