Sadly my personal life struggles and work load have made me severely reduce my exploratory walks on the internet for such an underrated pieces of tech.
But from some months ago I still remember The Unison language. Having the language itself find and cache common sub-structures inside it as content-addressable DB definitely sounds like the future to me.
Plus the older I get the more cranky I get about “language X is best! no, language Y is better!” stuff. Fact is, I haven’t found an excellent language, ever, and believe me I tried.
Another thought while we’re on this: I believe in the near future language syntax and runtime implementation will get separated. One example in how this is already happening are all languages that use LLVM for their compiler backend – Rust, Gerbil Scheme, and many others.
So if there’s an underrated language / tech out there, it should emphasize on a few key elements – mostly ability to mutate the code easily with tooling.
Classic programming will die in the next few decades. There’s a huge pressure to be able to issue commands like “remove this route” or “add this REST API endpoint” or “add a property test for module X with limitations A, B and C”. And I’d love to work on that but hey, nobody is paying for it so for now it’s just a hobby… hobby for which I scarcely have the time. sigh