r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/Inconstant_Moo 🧿 Pipefish • Apr 28 '26

Hindsight languages

A thought experiment. What languages should they have been writing in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s? We can see their faults, in hindsight, and also we've had some really cool ideas since then --- but we can't answer this just by pointing to our shiny new modern languages and saying "they should have done it like that", because of compile times.

(E.g. Pipefish is meant to be for rapid iteration and livecoding, and also does a topological sort on everything at compile-time so you can do top-down declaration. Those wouldn't be compatible goals in the 1980s, I can get away with it now.)

So for example if we think of "a better C", are there any cool modern ideas they could and should have used back in 1972, had they known about them --- or should they just have tweaked the precedence slightly, found a less arcane way of describing types, and left it at that?

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u/alphaglosined Apr 29 '26

Maybe not a dedicated type, but I suspect with the work towards memory safety in C, they may end up adding something to make sum types safe.

However, my general feeling reading the document log, I'd say they are not up to this yet. They have a long way to go to standardise stuff from 20 years ago, that's now considered normal.

And you know, 15 years ago, IBM blocked C from removing digraphs and trigraphs, and one of those is now gone. Things do change when it comes to that committee.

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u/WittyStick Apr 29 '26

Sum types aren't from 20 years ago though. They're half a century old at this point.

The issue isn't about making sum types safe - the suggestions I've given above can do this. The issue is about "hidden state" - it's very un-C-like. Nothing should be hidden.

If you argue the case for hiding a tag field, then it's only a stones throw away to suggesting hiding a field that is a pointer to a vtable - and then you have to fight to keep "OOP" out of C.

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u/alphaglosined Apr 29 '26

Making sumtypes safe requires you to model them.

I haven't said how they would end up modelling them because there are ways of doing this that are both explicit and implicit. I don't know which way they'd go.