|
This is a very difficult question. We know somewhat his preferences, because he worked on implementing ALGOL 60 [0][1], but unfortunately we are blocked by a bit of incommensurability; in that time, garbage collection was not something that could be taken for granted. As a result, what he might have built in our era is hard to imagine. That said, he did have relatively nice things to say about Haskell [2] and preferred Haskell to Java: > Finally, in the specific comparison of Haskell versus Java, Haskell, though not perfect, is of a quality that is several orders of magnitude higher than Java, which is a mess (and needed an extensive advertizing campaign and aggressive salesmanship for its commercial acceptance). I imagine that he would have liked something structured, equational, declarative, and modular; he would have wanted to treat programs as mathematical objects, as he says in [2]. Beyond that, though, we'll never know. He left some predictions like [3] but they are vague. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_60 [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/MCReps/MR35.PDF [2] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/OtherDocs... [3] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/E... |