This is part of a series of posts in which I am documenting what is wrong with certain popular programming languages that I am (more or less) familiar with. The aim of these posts is to support a future post in which I will be describing what the ideal programming language would look like for me.

I will be amending and revising these texts over time.

This is part of a series of posts in which I am documenting what is wrong with certain popular programming languages that I am (more or less) familiar with. The aim of these posts is to support a future post in which I will be describing what the ideal programming language would look like for me.

I will be amending and revising these texts over time.

This is part of a series of posts in which I am documenting what is wrong with certain popular programming languages that I am (more or less) familiar with. The aim of these posts is to support a future post in which I will be describing what the ideal programming language would look like for me.

I will be amending and revising these texts over time.

I have something blasphemous to tell you.

Unit Testing is wrong.

There, I said it.

I know I just insulted most people's sacred cow.

Sorry, not sorry.

I will explain, bear with me.

Scenario:

• You are using a laptop with one or more external monitors at home and (a different set of external monitors) at the office.

Problem:

• Every once in a while, when you switch between home and office, some buggy application will not handle its screen positioning correctly, so it will open up off-screen. In the taskbar you can see that the application has launched, but the application window is invisible.

How to fix:

Abstract

My thoughts and notes on how I would like a new programming language to look like.

The unique selling point of the language is:

Automatic memory reclamation without garbage collection.

The secondary selling point of the language is:

"Looks like Python." (The similarity is only superficial, but that is irrelevant.)

The complete set of selling points of the language are:

• Elegant. (Attractive for learning, and for non-programmers.)
• Expressive. (Attractive to experienced programmers.)
• Consistent. (Attractive to developer teams.)
• Safe. (Suitable for mission-critical applications.)
• Performant. (Suitable for high performance-per-watt applications.)
• Lean. (Suitable for resource-constrained computing.)

This is work-in-progress; It is bound to be heavily amended as time passes, especially if I try some new language, like Kotlin or Rust, and get ideas from it.

Summary of language characteristics