I started my career as C# dev and thought highly of Java because it’s what C# is ripping off of. Then I actually tried writing Java and had a new found appreciation for C#. This was over 10 years ago though.
I’m still hoping for browsers to become some kind of open standard application environments and web apps to become actual apps running on this environment.
There’s also a lesser known Enlightenment-based Moksha desktop. From what I understand, they rolled their windows manager and a set of applications. The creators went all-in on eastern religion terminology. Try Bodhi linux to get full experience, even though I think the UI is quite a bit off and ugly.
I think elixir/erlang is also in the same class of languages as clojure in that sense. A lot of lisp-like languages tend to go into that trend, I guess. I love working in it.
May be my headspace was a bit too much in systems that benefit from rapid prototyping. Other class of systems might benefit greatly from type safety and unit tests. Even though, I still felt a bit iffy about unit tests and almost ideological spouting points of it. I struggled with unit testing for a few years and now I just use them for automation of bigger picture behaviour testing. Call them integration tests or whatever.
I wouldn’t say it’s in a bad place either. Most enterprise grade technologies already have great debugging tools. Sure, those hot reloads, live updates are nice for UI development. But, I was thinking more of something built from the ground up to be, well, “feedback driven” in general. Most new stuffs that came out in the last decade touted their compiler as a killer feature first and rest of the tools are only developed as the ecosystem mature. May be that’s just the best way to go about creating new successful language ecosystems, I don’t know. Sorry if it feels like I’m being vague about the specifics. That’s because I really only have vague ideas about whole the whole thing would work.
I’d imagine there would be no need to give up type safety, unit testing and all that though. I’m thinking more about language and tool creators’ focus and efforts going mostly into compiler and type safety.
Nice, JetBrains does not disappoint. It’s been a long time since I last used one of their tools. What I’m hoping for is the first-class usage of a similar tool. There would be no debug mode. May be you can say the “debugger” starts as soon as you open up your project and is constantly giving you feedback as you code. For me, I value frequent feedback with potentially unsafe code over having to satisfy the compiler. Sure, having both would be nice as well.