Rust and C++ came to mind when I wrote that. That's why I didn't write modern languages _must_, but only called it a minus if they didn't.
And thanks for the relativism in that remark about the most highly polished language from the 1980s. I fear you are right in that (example: today, a colleague said this was the first time he created a thread. He has had a job as a developer for a few years, and, given his age, likely never wrote for a CPU that isn't multi-core. Luckily, he isn't dumb, as he asked what would happen if that thread threw an exception)
> Go is probably the most highly polished language from the 1980s.
I think ML pretty objectively takes that crown, semantically speaking. For simplicity and elegance it's pretty difficult to beat.
I should have said mainstream 1980s. Obviously you can find any number of more sophisticated lanugages in the 1980s by features, give or take the multicore support which, depending on context, was less relevant back then, but not in the mainstream. By that metric ML is still probably "ahead of its time".
I don't think so either. What he wrote was unclear (sorry, tptacek). I was clarifying what I'm pretty sure he meant. It's not like I've never done the same thing in writing myself.
"Also, this requirement effectively rules out ever using go in a repl. I think that is a minus for modern programming languages."
It's ruled out for a lot of other more fundamental reasons. Go is probably the most highly polished language from the 1980s.
This would be a much greater condemnation, except the sort of people who tend to frequent HN (including me!) tend to grotesquely overestimate how much most programmers are spending coming up to speed on the latest and greatest. In many contexts, a "really nicely polished 1980s language" is a step up in either reliability or speed. Perl is nominally a more advanced language, but on the whole, most programmers just use it as a sort of dynamically-typed C. I think the majority of programmers still aren't all that clear on what a "map" is. Arming my fellow programmers with more capabilities doesn't solve any problem either I or they have, but can make them worse.
Also, I'd observe that even for modern programming languages, "needs a REPL" is setting the bar high. Rust will probably never have a REPL. I see a couple of defunct projects trying and I haven't studied them, but at best Rust could have an all-in-unsafe REPL dialect, because who's going to be able to reliably type borrow-safe code into the REPL on the first try?