Ask HN: What would your ideal programming language look like?
Extra points for original ideas, syntax or semantics.
Perfectly OK to argue for existing languages too. (Why not?)
Perfectly OK to argue for existing languages too. (Why not?)
I write glue code for CLI tools a lot. Something specialized similarly to shell is required.
I write networking code at various levels, sometimes on top of HTTP, other times I need linewise protocol with SSL/TLS, and sometimes I need to work with raw IP packets or ethernet frames.
I need sometimes to interact with operating system closely. A necessity to have ABI easily translated to what C gives.
There are times when I need fast program with very small memory footprint, so I need clear control over memory usage.
No single language nor runtime can fulfil all these (barring uselessly general statement that "Linux is such thing"). It's a norm for me to juggle with three or four languages at the same time on a single project.
I admit it: syntax matters for me, I'm actually more productive when dealing with truly elegant code. Also I don't do systems level programming (Rust seems interesting for this if I ever need it)
Effectively what I want is a high-level scripting language with 'c-like' syntax, that can be compiled into a static binary, to allow easier distribution of (in particular) shell utilities.
I have a feeling Go may come close, but I have a vague feeling I wasn't crazy about the syntax of it.
e.g. I want to just allocate a string to a variable, I don't want to worry about the length of the string in memory etc.
I looked briefly at stuff like Squirrel, but it seems largely abandoned these days, and as far as I can tell to compile it requires a C/C++ host app, you can't just compile a .nut file(s) to an executable, and as a scripting language obviously requires installing the Squirrel Shell runtime first.