Object Mentor Blog: A Wish List for the Next Mainstream Programming Language

A Wish List for the Next Mainstream Programming Language

Michael Feathers — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 20:06:00 -0600

It’s been fun watching the reactions to new features in C# 4.0. Some people love them. Others wonder, legitimately, where it is all going to end. The argument for feature addition is simple: over time we find better ways of doing things and our languages, as tools, should allow us that flexibility. The only downside to this strategy is that you end up with sprawling, complex languages over time – you never get to revisit the foundations.

Fortunately, however, people design new languages all the time and some of them do eventually enter the mainstream. We get a chance to start over and address foundational problems. And, that’s nice because we can do better than Java and C# for mainstream development and I don’t think there is any way to mutate either language into a better foundation.

Before I launch into the wish list, however, I want to set the context.

When I say “mainstream language” I am talking about languages which are in the Java/C#/VB market space – languages which are light on rocket science, seen as suitable for large-scale development, and don’t scare people. So, I’m not going to suggest dynamic typing or (on the other side of the coin) tight Hindley-Milner type systems and lazy evaluation. I love those approaches and I’m happy (in particular) that Ruby is gaining widespread acceptance, but I’m not going to fight that fight here. In the immediate future, for whatever reason, there will be development shops which feel much more comfortable with traditional static typing – the kind found in Java, C#, and VB. Given that, the question becomes: what can we do to make that sort of language better?

Here’s my list:

Immutability by Default – Over the past few years, a rather broad consensus has emerged around the idea that code is easier to understand and maintain when it has less mutable state. This isn’t a new idea; it’s been around for as long as functional programming, but our recent concerns with concurrency and our move toward multi-core computing just underscore the state problem. A mainstream language should, at the very least, make mutable data something special. References should be immutable by default and mutable state should be marked by a special keyword so that its use leaps out at you. It’s too late for the current crop of languages to make such a pervasive change, but the next mainstream language could.
Support for Components – In large-scale development, teams have to manage usage and dependency across an organization. The notions of public, protected, and private are too coarse as protection mechanisms, and we really need scopes larger than class, assembly, and package. In the end, this sort of protection is a social issue, so we should have mechanisms which make use very easy within a team (3-10 people working together) and somewhat more manageable between teams. It’s odd that language-based support for this work stopped with Ada and the Modula family of languages. Java’s recent move toward support for modules seems to be an exception.
Support for Scoped and Explicit Metaprogramming – In the past, language designers avoided adding meta-programming support to their languages because they were scared it would be abused. However, we’ve learned that without meta-programming support, people create yet another distinctive type of mess. If there is a middle ground for mainstream languages it probably involves scoping the use of metaprogramming and making it far more detectable. If, for instance, all of the code which modifies a given component had to be registered with some easily locatable component-specific construct, maintenance would be much easier.
Support for Testing – This one is only a matter of time, I think. In the last 10 years we’ve seen an explosion of mocking tools and testing frameworks. It’s not clear to me that we’ve reached any sort of consensus yet, but I suspect that at the very least we could add constructs to a language which make mocking and stubbing much easier. It’s also about time that languages attempt to solve the problems that dependency injection addresses.
Imposed I/O Separation – This is the controversial one. The more I work with Haskell, the more I notice that there is a beneficial discipline that comes from factoring your program so that its points of contact with the outside world can not be mixed with the pieces doing the work. When you first start to work that way, it feels like a straitjacket, but I think the benefit is apparent to anyone who has had to go on a spelunking expedition in an application to find and mock parts of the system which touch the outside world. Is that discipline too much for a mainstream language? I hope not.

So, that’s my list. There is no “grand language planning board” which decides these things. We will move forward chaotically like ever other industry, but I do hope that some of these features make it into the next mainstream programming language.

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