What modern language would Dijkstra approve of?
That said, he did have relatively nice things to say about Haskell [2] and preferred Haskell to Java:
> Finally, in the specific comparison of Haskell versus Java, Haskell, though not perfect, is of a quality that is several orders of magnitude higher than Java, which is a mess (and needed an extensive advertizing campaign and aggressive salesmanship for its commercial acceptance).
I imagine that he would have liked something structured, equational, declarative, and modular; he would have wanted to treat programs as mathematical objects, as he says in [2]. Beyond that, though, we'll never know. He left some predictions like [3] but they are vague.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_60
[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/MCReps/MR35.PDF
[2] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/OtherDocs...
[3] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/E...
The first languages and their compilers were strongly driven by hardware constraints, a kilobyte of memory costing an arm and a leg.
Imagine storing function names in memory to compile the program, it doesn't fit in 1 kB. Imagine storing the whole source code in memory for processing, it doesn't work when there is less than a 1 MB of memory available.
It's ridiculous today but it's real reasons why things were made global back then or why C/pascal split the code between a header and a source file.
Zig doesn't do either of those things. There are a fair amount of criticisms of the mental model of the author that I've seen voiced - some including security.
What's worse, the community surrounding Zig (in particular, the Discord community) operates more like a cult - any negative questioning gets you shunned.
I was personally a huge fan of Zig until a number of questionable design decisions and dismissed bug reports lead me to believe it will forever remain a toy language. I can't imagine Dijkstra approving.
The cult-like attitude that many programmers have about languages certainly supports Dijkstra’s claims about the immaturity of the field.
And, for all his complaining, I don't know of any language that he authored. He's sure good at telling everyone that they're doing it wrong, though...
He helped create the ideas of Structured Programming, which most of us now take for granted, since pretty much every language in popular use these days are based on these ideas.