Probably Dance

My main motivation for wanting to write a programming language is that I believe I can make programmers much more productive. Somewhere in the archives of unfinished blog posts for this website here I have a very long post about what language features and coding practices I think contribute to programmer productivity, (and what harms productivity) but I believe that in the long term the one most important contributor is the quality the tools that we use to program.

And “tools” is a very vague word. It includes everything from source control to text editors to test frameworks to debuggers to refactoring helpers to code completion to compiler warning messages to static analysis to profilers, diff, make and many more categories. All of this surrounding infrastructure that we use around coding actually has a much bigger impact on productivity than which language we pick. Which makes sense because those tools are usually written by someone not directly involved in the language. And if they took the time to write the tool, you bet it will have a big impact on their productivity. So I want to make a language that will have the best tools ever. I think that’s actually not too difficult. It seems that nobody has had that ambition before.

And for that my language will store its source code in a database instead of text files.

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