As some already mentioned below, in my opinion it would depend on the purpose of the language. In the case of the general language, these are some of my personal favourites:
- expressive type system
- easy & intuitive to start with, but also powerful if needed (low floor, high ceiling)
- has a relatively small set of core concepts which are then composed together to build things further
- rich set of libraries (although pretty obvious and not really a feature)
I think our search for the "grail" general language will continue, probably forever. Languages such as Haskell, Rust & Go (and probably a lot of others I haven't heard of) are breaking the boundaries and introducing new concepts which then slowly spill over to more "mainstream" languages (e.g. the advent of functional programming constructs we are witnessing in Java, JS etc.).
Other than that, I also believe that more and more DSLs will start appearing, which is basically languages specialised for a specific purpose - which will make them extra convenient in their domain but not usable in the general case.
Also, I expect the tooling (IDEs, build systems) to become more tightly integrated with the language, especially for the DSLs - creating the end product which at the end will be usable not only by the programming experts.
I have actually, together with my brother, been working on such an idea for the past year. We made a DSL for the domain of web apps - it is basically a declarative language that compiles to the stack of choice implemented in the general language (e.g. React/Node). This makes it possible to express some web-app specific concepts with much less code, but is also constrained to that specific domain.
Comments
As some already mentioned below, in my opinion it would depend on the purpose of the language. In the case of the general language, these are some of my personal favourites:
- expressive type system
- easy & intuitive to start with, but also powerful if needed (low floor, high ceiling)
- has a relatively small set of core concepts which are then composed together to build things further
- rich set of libraries (although pretty obvious and not really a feature)
I think our search for the "grail" general language will continue, probably forever. Languages such as Haskell, Rust & Go (and probably a lot of others I haven't heard of) are breaking the boundaries and introducing new concepts which then slowly spill over to more "mainstream" languages (e.g. the advent of functional programming constructs we are witnessing in Java, JS etc.).
Other than that, I also believe that more and more DSLs will start appearing, which is basically languages specialised for a specific purpose - which will make them extra convenient in their domain but not usable in the general case. Also, I expect the tooling (IDEs, build systems) to become more tightly integrated with the language, especially for the DSLs - creating the end product which at the end will be usable not only by the programming experts.
I have actually, together with my brother, been working on such an idea for the past year. We made a DSL for the domain of web apps - it is basically a declarative language that compiles to the stack of choice implemented in the general language (e.g. React/Node). This makes it possible to express some web-app specific concepts with much less code, but is also constrained to that specific domain.
If anybody wants to take a look it is here: https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp
Would be interesting to see the results of your research and what majority thinks are the ideal language features.