The Future of Programming Languages

There’s an interesting panel discussion from the StrangeLoop2010 conference over on InfoQ:

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Future-of-Programming-Languages

There panel covers quite a range of different topics, but there was one in particular that caught my eye:

“Assert statements don’t clutter up the code, they beautify it. They preserve the programmers intent, and anything that preserves the programmers intent and makes it visible to the maintainer six months later, who could even be the programmer, is a good thing.” –Josh Bloch

There were a few other things said about Design by Contract, with a general positive feeling. But, as usual, only limited discussion of actual systems that do this…