HACKER Q&A
📣 andrewmcwatters

What does your ideal programming language look like?


Hi HN, happy Friday!

I'm not a developer working on a new programming language, but I am curious about what others would like to see in one.

What things do you wish a new programming language would consider?

  👤 andrewmcwatters Accepted Answer ✓
To keep my own ideas out of the original post, I really enjoy Lua and C, but working on multithreading in Lua is not very fun, and I wish I could work as fast as I do in C as I do in Lua with the latter being a scripting language.

I wish a new programming language would come around that had the simplicity of either but with some nice primitives for multithreading, and the ability to live reload compiled code.

I want the speed of C, ability to do simple multithreading, but also the speed of developing on Lua.

Since it would be a new programming language, I'd also enjoy FFI to interact with existing C libraries, much like the mostly automatic FFI from LuaJIT works, where you don't have to manually write bindings to the language.

👤 mark_l_watson
I would say Racket Scheme with the 40 years of infrastructure that Common Lisp has.