I posit this has already happened and the language is Typescript.
I don't see how a different language could meaningfully disrupt TS at this point. I don't actually even see what there is to disrupt, to be honest. TS is great and really productive, and scales to large teams well. What language has the potential to be 10x better than it?
Things that IMHO have the potential to create a profoundly better language for developing web applications include:
• A more expressive type and effect system
• A more capable module system and better dependency management
• A more comprehensive standard library
• Integral support for building distributed systems and modelling communication within them
Given those kinds of changes and avoiding a lot of the baggage, I think there is also room for a simpler, more systematic, more consistent syntax, which would be good for both human and computer readers. The latter is important because if it’s easily machine-readable then it’s easier to build tools, and building good tools around a programming language is a key factor in growing a large and sustainable ecosystem.
I don’t know what being “10x better than TypeScript” would mean quantitatively, but I find it easy to believe that a language could arrive within say the next 5 years that required less than half the time to develop the same functionality, produced less than half the defects that would need fixing later, and ran several times faster under realistic conditions.
That's unless the paradigm of most web apps fundamentally shifts - ie your distributed systems point.
Don't get me wrong, if such a 2x productivity increase over TS is possible I'd love to be wrong here and see that happen - not least just out of pure interest of how that language could be so much better, because clearly I'd be learning a lot there :-)
Personally, I’m optimistic that we can do much better than 2x on the important metrics as mainstream programming languages and the programmers using them adopt ideas that already exist in more obscure languages, programming research, and development teams that don’t necessarily publish their experiences openly.
I think some of the potential gains come just from making it easier and therefore quicker to read and write our own code. Better syntax, more expressive language features, a more comprehensive standard library, and eliminating some of the historical baggage like how null/undefined are handled could all help a lot compared to today’s TypeScript, IMHO.
There are also other areas, such as safety and making it easier to work with other code from within or outside our own organisations, where today a huge proportion of a typical TypeScript developer’s time is probably wasted on things like wrangling dependency trees that could be much smaller and better managed, investigating preventable defects that currently reach later stages in the development process before they are noticed, and writing unit tests for negative cases that would be unnecessary if the language itself designed out those possibilities.
Something that struck me a little while back is just how unimaginably large this part of the programming industry has become. We’re talking about millions of developers working on web applications and companies collectively worth trillions of dollars. How much would even a 10% long-term improvement in developer productivity be worth to the world? What about 200%? What about 1000% or more? Personally, I think we still have a long way to go before we run into any inherent limits on developer productivity, and we’re learning more all the time.
