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Coeffects: The next big programming challenge

Many advances in programming language design are driven by some practical motivations. Sometimes, the practical motivations are easy to see - for example, when they come from some external change such as the rise of multi-core processors. Sometimes, discovering the practical motivations is a tricky task - perhaps because everyone is used to a certain way of doing things that we do not even see how poor our current solution is.

The following two examples are related to the work done in F# (because this is what I'm the most familiar with), but you can surely find similar examples in other languages:

I believe that the next important practical challenge for programming language designers is of the kind that is not easy to see - because we are so used to doing things in certain ways that we cannot see how poor they are. The problem is designing languages that are better at working with (and understanding) the context in which programs are executed.

Published: Wednesday, 8 January 2014, 4:31 PM
Tags: research, coeffects, functional programming, comonads
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