Now that I’ve been working in the industry for a while, there are a few things on my wish list for programming languages. These aren’t terribly obvious things.
I believe academic programming languages need built in profiling, both memory and runtime performance. I know, I know. If students can’t get their heads around basic programming, then why bother with these topics?
Still, in the real world, you need these features, and yet, they are not designed from the beginning. If they were, I think you’d find a lot of cool things about your program, in very practical ways. I know languages like Java like to hide how much memory is used, but to be fair, so does C++. Indeed, finding how much memory objects use is hardly a straight-forward task. If such monitoring were easily available, say, in a debug mode, you’d be able to point this out to students.
I also believe that languages need to separate out printing and debugging messages. Java does this, somewhat, by letting System.out.println be for standard printing and System.err.println be for error printing. Of course, most people say you should use logging, which, for my money, still needs to be greatly simplified, at least, when you look at the log4j model.
I suppose, if polled, you’d find most people wanting to teach some functional language or some such, to allow for greater semantics, but always near and dear to a pragmatic programmer’s heart is how fast things run, and how much memory it consumes.
