# Next-Paradigm Programming Languages: What Will They Look Like and What Changes Will They Bring?

## TL;DR

This paper explores the core principles and anticipated changes in next-generation high-productivity programming languages, emphasizing performance variations, workflow shifts, and reduced reliance on formal proofs based on extensive experience with declarative languages.

## Contribution

It identifies inevitable tenets of future high-productivity languages, providing insights into their principles and potential impact on programming practices.

## Key findings

- Performance variability including automatic complexity transformations
- Shift in programmer workflow emphasizing testing as understanding
- Reduced need for formal proofs in future languages

## Abstract

The dream of programming language design is to bring about orders-of-magnitude productivity improvements in software development tasks. Designers can endlessly debate on how this dream can be realized and on how close we are to its realization. Instead, I would like to focus on a question with an answer that can be, surprisingly, clearer: what will be the common principles behind next-paradigm, high-productivity programming languages, and how will they change everyday program development? Based on my decade-plus experience of heavy-duty development in declarative languages, I speculate that certain tenets of high-productivity languages are inevitable. These include, for instance, enormous variations in performance (including automatic transformations that change the asymptotic complexity of algorithms); a radical change in a programmer's workflow, elevating testing from a near-menial task to an act of deep understanding; a change in the need for formal proofs; and more.