Remembering the Future

I have been working a long time to bring queries into a modern programming language.

. . .

The next horizon is already in sight. Queries will eventually become runtime optimized. They will enable automatic parallelism, scaling and distributed processing.

Yet, we are not there yet. With the help of a lot of other people, I’ve only just arrived at that first horizon, a place where the mirage forms into solid shapes and the world that I only imagined becomes substantive, where I can look out across the landscape of all that was devised and see it functioning, its clockwork gears spinning, its implications twinkling like dew upon fields of freshly grown grass. And I can simply query it, all of it, the grass, the trees, anything identifiable and enumerable. And it just works.

Yet in the midst of all that, I am overcome with another thought. Another horizon has opened up in my mind and I can see a bit further, beyond the benefits and the boosts, beyond the query itself. I can see now that it was only the first stepping stone. Something much bigger is out there. A paradigm shift is coming, where all things become fluid, all boundaries dissolve and intent becomes first class.

And it has certainly all been done before.

Topics: Programming | Language | Design