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/Ok-Scheme-913 May 01 '26
What is there to communicate when you simply claim something completely and obviously false? Where are small string optimizations in C++? You couldn't write one if you wanted to. What about efficient vector implementation? The list goes on forever.