Next-paradigm programming languages: what will they look like and what changes will they bring?

Abstract

The dream of programming language design is to bring about orders-of-magnitude productivity improvements in software development tasks. Designers can endlessly debate on how this dream can be realized and on how close we are to its realization. Instead, I would like to focus on a question with an answer that can be, surprisingly, clearer: what will be the common principles behind next-paradigm, high-productivity programming languages, and how will they change everyday program development? Based on my decade-plus experience of heavy-duty development in declarative languages, I speculate that certain tenets of highproductivity languages are inevitable. These include, for instance, enormous variations in performance (including automatic transformations that change the asymptotic complexity of algorithms); a radical change in a programmer's workflow, elevating testing from a near-menial task to an act of deep understanding; a change in the need for formal proofs; and more.[W]e've passed the point of diminishing returns. No future language will give us the factor of 10 advantage that assembler gave us over binary. No future language will give us 50%, or 20%, or even 10% reduction in workload.Robert C. Martin [17]

Technical Dimensions of Programming Systems

“…This has a wide range of implications. Smaragdakis [82] notes, for example, that this means the implementation can significantly change the performance of a program.…”