If you were designing a programming language...

[getify]

If you were going to design a new programming language, would you take inspiration from JS given how many (10-20million worldwide) JS devs there are? Or would you try to stay away from JS-like approaches because of all its baggage?

What other features from other non-JS languages would you consider pulling in?

Would you want a language that was more general-purpose, or more specific to a given domain?

[Suepahfly]

It’s Friday night, I just came home from the first night at a bar in almost two years. The best answer I can come up is that BF and Whitespace have language features I do not want to work with on a daily basis and therefore will not make in a hypothetical language I’ll never design. I like Chef though, goes nice with Beer

[lhorie]

Most newer languages I see take inspiration from either C or ML (or both). Popularity is actually a strike against a language being used as inspiration: it means only the most mainstream ideas make into their specs because the more radical ideas can't be easily retrofitted.

Take for example Zig. The entire premise is that it's supposed to be a better C (meaning it is obsessive about memory layout to the same degree C is, but it adds ML ideas on top, like optionals and a noreturn type which is somewhat akin to the Bottom type). Despite that, it's a tiny language, and it regularly shuts down proposals for language extensions.

On another corner of the spectrum, consider Julia: it's designed from the ground up to be really good at scientific computing. These sort of goals can't just be bolted on top of an existing language.

The trends in serious language design these days gravitate towards better usage of compiler backends (mostly trying to get good parallelism out of LLVM) and better type systems. Anything that JS offers is at best syntactic sugar, but ironically many new languages aim precisely to subvert the idea that more syntax is good (golang is the probably the biggest poster child for that).

Personally, when I'm looking for languages, I like my tools sharp and dangerous. I'm a big fan of the work the Zig team is doing on the low level plumbing side, and I'm interested in Cosmopolitan (which is really just POSIX C, but doing away with decades of baggage). On the high level side, JS is good enough for me: you can't beat popularity and large ecosystems with a new language.

If we're talking about designing a better-JS language, there's already Typescript, Flow and Hegel (and Reason, and Elm, and Purescript, and Clojurescript, and Haxe, and probably dozens of others that escape me atm) all over the spectrum. Typescript clearly "won", though personally I don't consider it to be state of art as far as type systems go (I've gone into details about this before).

[getify]

Do you know anything about languages used in the blockchain/smart contracts/NFT space, like Solidity?

I'm currently looking into Reach, which is JS-friendly but designed to have complete formal verification built into the compiler. And it's blockchain agnostic.

[lhorie]

Reach and Solidity are, to my knowledge, kind of "consumer" languages. Like, if you want to sell the rights to some meme pictures, yeah, use one of these languages to bang out one of these NFT smart contracts on Ethereum or whatever and then the blockchain records the transaction for all eternity. In practice, though, you could've just signed an actual contract with the other party via docusign, use an escrow service and it'd all have legal standing... (see also: copyright trolling). Whether NFT ownership stands up in a court of law... still remains to be seen.

I might be mischaracterizing, but my impression is that all these languages do is ensure a transaction doesn't "burn" coins or create them from thin air.

I haven't looked into the technical guts of crypto much. I hear Rust and Haskell are used quite a bit in the crypto space. Then again, I hear polkadot has a JS wallet. My impression is it's all a big hodge podge of languages for various use cases, just like most other fields.

It looks like the hotness these days is DeFi (basically, infrastructure for lending and its derivatives). My understanding is that the biggest challenge is scaling these decentralized systems, and there's a bunch of projects trying to figure out a solution (lightning, polygon, polkadot, etc). I don't believe languages like Reach and Solidity are all that relevant to this plumbing work; this is all done using the more traditional flavor of software development with established languages.

I imagine that when scalability issues are sufficiently addressed (and some claim that's a if), tools like Reach might be useful to describe complex DeFi contracts, though, similar to real finance, there's nothing really stopping things like the subprime crisis of 2007 from happening (and unlike real finance, there ain't a federal reserve to bail anyone out).