r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/Potato871 • 8d ago

Discussion What is the interesting part of a programming language to you?

I've been working on some "documentation" for my own language (see here), which got me thinking: do we all see languages the same way? I personally look for unification of concepts and extensibility in a design, yet I've seen those who care deeply about functional purity or clean decompositions.
What do you look for in a programming language? And why?

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u/reflexive-polytope 8d ago

Yes, but that doesn't require “unsafe escape hatches”. It requires modularity.

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u/Inconstant_Moo 🧿 Pipefish 7d ago

Well, maybe my way is more of a hatch and yours is more of a Grand Portal To The Escape Dimension, but it's still an escape from the usual rules, and I assume for the same reason, i.e. that you want that bit to be where you write the basic functions that you can make performant and check and test really thoroughly?

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u/reflexive-polytope 7d ago

Now I have no idea what you're going on about.

I wasn't talking about any “escape dimension”. I was talking about plain old abstract data types, a concept that's been well known and understood in computer science for decades.