Over 10 years ago, I had this sort of a prediction that, with the massive adoption of a dynamic language like javascript on both client/server sides and test-driven development gaining a lot of ground, the future of programming would be dynamic and “feedback-driven”. As in, you would immediately see the results of your code as you type, based on the tests you created. To naively simplify, imagine a split screen of your code editor and a console view showing relevant watch expressions from the code you’re typing.

Instead what happened was the industry’s focus shifted to type safety and smart compilers, and I followed along. I’m just not smart enough to question where the whole industry was heading. And my speck of imagination on how coding would have looked like in the future wasn’t completely thought out. It was just that, a speck of imagination that occurred to me as I was debugging something tedious.

Now, most of the programming language world, seem to be focusing on smarter compilers. But is there some language or platform, that focus instead on a different kind of programming paradigm (not sort of OOP, FP paradigm, may be call it the programming workflow paradigm?). May be it comes with a really strong debugger tooling that’s constantly giving you feedback on what your code is actually doing. Think REPL on steroids. I can imagine there would be challenges with parsing/evaluating incomplete code syntax and functions. So I guess, the whole compiler/translator side has to be thought out from the ground up as well.

Disclaimer: There’s a good chance I simply don’t know what I’m talking about because I’m no language designer or even close to understanding how programming languages and it’s ecosystems are created. Just sharing some thoughts I had as a junior dev back in the day.

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      21 year ago

      Nice, JetBrains does not disappoint. It’s been a long time since I last used one of their tools. What I’m hoping for is the first-class usage of a similar tool. There would be no debug mode. May be you can say the “debugger” starts as soon as you open up your project and is constantly giving you feedback as you code. For me, I value frequent feedback with potentially unsafe code over having to satisfy the compiler. Sure, having both would be nice as well.