Lambda the Ultimate

Let's make an on-topic place to discuss programming language relevant issues in concurrency and non-determinism. Software development in general isn't really on topic. It really needs to be about an aspect of PL design or implementation, or else LtU isn't suitable.

It seems folks designing a PL would like a language to be suitable for performance work, in a world where scaling better may imply doing more things in parallel, to get more hardware usage per unit of time in lieu of processors actually running faster. The plan is something like: well if cycles have stalled we can just use more cores. In general this seems to lead to unpredictability, which perhaps might be addressed by PL tech, somehow or other.

Something is missing in how developers specify what they think code will do, in the large. It's a common belief it will be obvious. ("It should be obvious what the code does from reading it, so comments are superfluous.") This is slightly like thinking other people will recognize a tune you have in mind when you drum out its rhythm with your fingers, when in fact they will only hear you drumming your fingers. A pattern you expect to be obvious won't be.

Maybe more than one layer of grammar would help. (Just an idea.) In addition to local language syntax, you could specify larger patterns of what will happen, in terms of expected patterns in future inter-agent transactions, whether they be objects or something else. There seems lack of current art in capturing developer intent about shape of event sequences. Sometimes I suspect a few people intend to fix this with determinism in language behavior, which doesn't seem a good fit for fallible distributed internet components.

I have nothing to post unless a remark catches my eye. If I have something interesting to say, I will. (I don't blog any more, and I'm all but unreachable except here, unless you call my phone or email my work address. My online presence is near zero. I don't even check LinkedIn.)

What specifically would you do to a programming language to address the emergent elephant that results from code specifying tail, legs, trunk, etc?