SoftwareWishlist.md

I'm compiling a list of the things I'd like to see in a programming language and its surrounding environment. I'm not expecting to find one language that ticks all the boxes, but I'm hoping for one that will tick quite a few.

I have experience with the following:

• C#
• Clojure
• Go
• Racket
• Elixir
• PHP
• JavaScript
• Java
• F#

I would like to try:

• Haskell
• Elm
• LFE
• Scala
• Nim
• Lua
• CL
• Rust

Language

• Pattern matching
  • Very concise way of writing methods
  • Reduces the need for formal structures/types
  • Efficient
  • Safe
• Immutability & value equality
• Strongly typed
  • At least type annotations that can be analyzed statically
  • Should have type inference to reduce verbosity
  • Should support generics or traits
  • Should have reflection to allow for metaprogramming
• Real parallelism and concurrency
  • Not like Racket
  • Not like most scripting languages
• Solid tooling for streams and lazy data structures
• Functional mindset
  • LINQ/Rx
  • map/reduce/filter
• Great dependency management
  • Supports repeatable builds
  • No need to vendor everything
  • No need for dependencies in environment (Ruby/Python/Perl/PHP)
• Optional: Dependencies in source form
  • Makes debugging much, much easier
  • Easier to tweak external dependencies and fix bugs
• Optional: Compile/package to single deployable artifact
  • No dependence on environment when deploying
  • Shouldn't take up 100s of MBs for self-contained binary + dependencies
• Optional: Macros
  • Allows developer to patch up the language
  • Can be very concise
• Optional: CSP style parallelism
  • Go's channels
  • Clojure's core.async
• Optional: Message passing
• Optional: Fast compiler
• Optional: REPL
• Optional: Strong editor/IDE support
• Optional: A real debugger
• Optional: Cross-platform
• Optional: Supports in-code documentation for generating docs

Distributed systems

• First class support, or strong libraries
• Must support on-premises deployment
• Resilient and self-healing
• Strong debugging/tracing utilities
• Optional: Reliable persistence technology

Drivers/libraries for external tools

• Oracle
• Kafka
• Cassandra
• Mongo
• ElasticSearch
• RabbitMQ
• ZooKeeper

HTML parser

• Based on recognized reference implementation
• Robust and battle-tested
• Performant
• Supports CSS2+3 and jQuery-style CSS selectors

HTTP

• Solid HTTP server(s), possibly part of the distribution
• Web frameworks like Sinatra/Express/Nancy/Plug/Ring
• Clients with streaming support

Deployment and ops

• Support for hot-code reloading
• Support for rolling upgrades
• Easy to inspect, trace and debug
• Runs on both Windows and Linux