Go 1.3+ Compiler Overhaul
(Update: TLDR --> Modifying the Dick Sites quote from the original article: "I would rather write programs to help me <i>refactor/transform</i> programs than <i>refactor/transform</i> programs." So, a programming language highly amenable to that would be very powerful).<p>I just had an insight while reading this. It's a powerful insight. (I am surely not the first person to have this insight, but it's WAY ahead of being mainstream).<p>A programming language that could be PROGRAMMATICALLY REFACTORED would be a HUGE home run.<p>I know Lispers will jump in here. But I know Lisp (somewhat), and it does not have what I'm talking about. (Hell, maybe Go does ... if so, I finally get what the fuss is about).<p>The idea is that you could develop a huge codebase in this language, and then you could write code (probably in some other language) that REFACTORS the original codebase. Of course, you CAN write translators, as the original article mentions. But I want a whole new programming language that is designed from the GROUND UP to be amenable to programmatic transformation.<p>NOT just Lisp with its AST's and macros. The "transformation language" should be able to understand the following aspects of the original code: its modularity, its test coverage, which parts are functionally pure/impure, which parts are parallel/not, and the full compiler-level semantics of every piece of text in the code (in other words, what JetBrains knows ... this is a local variable name, this is a function name, etc.)<p>In other words, the original language has to capture more of the programmers intent (probably by inferring most of it). The intent-information is mostly or completely unneeded at runtime, but it is VITAL at automated translation time.<p>Imagine having such a codebase, and being able to pull up a REPL and interactively start changing the modularity of the code by issuing commands. Or telling the transformation system to parallelize some portion of code that wasn't parallelized previously. Or saying something like, "Take all the code snippets that instantiate the xyz data structure, and change them to call this function instead."<p>Don't miss my point -- we have features like this here and there. Some IDE's more than others, some languages more than others. Nothing new there. But I'm talking about a <i>new programming language designed from the ground up to be highly amenable to this kind of interactive, automated transformation</i>. In other words, I think this might be the killer feature that allows one programming language to outcompete most others.<p>This might be the one programming language feature that we should focus on now, more than any other.