I would love to see a language re-embrace the elegance of Smalltalk block closures. I quit doing Smalltalk 8ish years ago. I’m happy enough with python and swift and Kotlin (and a lot of firmware C as well). They all have closure/lambda like stuff, but none of them are as simple/universal as the Smalltalk semantics/model of closures was.
The other thing I’d want is something better than generics. As I moved away from dynamic languages, I found I was ok with the swift/Kotlin type system mostly. Except for when generics get involved. For all but the trivial cases, I always feel like I have to really downshift to work through the compiler errors. It’s like me and the compiler just quit understanding each other. I don’t have the tools to express “this is what I want to do, you figure it out” and the compilers just say things “all your types are belong to us.”
The other thing I’d want is something better than generics. As I moved away from dynamic languages, I found I was ok with the swift/Kotlin type system mostly. Except for when generics get involved. For all but the trivial cases, I always feel like I have to really downshift to work through the compiler errors. It’s like me and the compiler just quit understanding each other. I don’t have the tools to express “this is what I want to do, you figure it out” and the compilers just say things “all your types are belong to us.”