Lamia. With illustrative designs by Will H. Low

This class of library functions are especially important for throwaway programs, which are often originally written for converting or extracting data. Many Perl programs probably begin as just a couple library calls stuck together. I think a lot of the advances that happen in programming languages in the next fifty years will have to do with library functions. I think future programming languages will have libraries that are as carefully designed as the core language. Programming language design will not be about whether to make your language strongly or weakly typed, or object oriented, or functional, or whatever, but about how to design great libraries. The kind of language designers who like to think about how to design type systems may shudder at this. It's almost like writing applications! Too bad. Languages are for programmers, and libraries are what programmers need. It's hard to design good libraries. It's not simply a matter of writing a lot of code. Once the libraries get too big, it can sometimes take longer to find the function you need than to write the code yourself ...»