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Ask Slashdot: What Should Be the Attributes of an Ideal Programming Language If Computers Were Infinitely Fast?

Posted by msmash on from the hypothetical-questions dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Earlier today, Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games, asked his Twitter followers an interesting question: "What are the attributes of an ideal programming language if computers were infinitely fast, and we designed for coding productivity only?" I could think of several things, the chief of which would be getting rid of the garbage collection. I was wondering what other things you folks would suggest?

7 of 326 comments (clear)

  1. I reject the question by SuperKendall · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is stupid. Computer will never be "infinitely fast" or even close to it. There is always the possibility of ding computation in such a way as to drag down any system.

    There is always a compromise between programmer productivity, code maintainability, and system performance. It's not like you can realistically escape this triad so why pretend one leg does not exist? The computer programming industry has enough problems with magical thinking as it is.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re:I reject the question by Topwiz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Also stupid is getting rid of garbage collection. If it happens automatically at infinite speed, removing it would have no effect on your coding productivity.

    2. Re:I reject the question by drew_kime · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There is always a compromise between programmer productivity, code maintainability, and system performance.

      But if you didn't have to worry about the performance, what would boost the other two?

      This is how great advances are made. Design for the world you wish you had, then figure out how to make it real.

      --
      Nope, no sig
  2. That makes no sense... by famebait · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Getting rid of garbage collection? The feature whose whole point is boosting productivity at the cost of performance? In a setting where performance is explicitly not and productivity explicitly is? Can you spell "hangup"?

     

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    sudo ergo sum
    1. Re:That makes no sense... by beelsebob · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yeh, I was thinking exactly this. The valid reasons for getting rid of garbage collection are along the lines of "it causes the application to end up using a shit ton of memory if you want it to be any way performant", and "you can't get sensible real time guarantees when your whole program might pause to execute GC".

      GC is exactly what you would want if you can guarantee that it executes in 0ms.

  3. Re:Stupid thought experiment is stupid. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You still have to write the correct logic. So the question is essentially, "what features of a programming language lead to least logical errors?"

  4. Ask this question another way... by yodleboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What a pedantic bunch. Mental race conditions because of the word 'infinitely'. Anyway, let's ask this question a different way. "If modern hardware had been available at the time, how would you have designed languages like C, C++ and JAVA? What compromises were made that continue to impact those languages?"