Writing secure code is ever more important. There are lots of examples: HBGary, Sony, Google.
Even if you’re not one of the biggest companies out there, security starts to become important as soon as your code can be accessed from the Internet. And frankly, which code today can’t?
What’s worse, the problems are always the same: SQL injections, not validating input, using code from somewhere else which is vulnerable. These problems are neither hard to find nor hard to fix. It’s only too much effort to add the necessary checking and warning code to the existing compilers.
So here is my assumption for my “The Next Best Thing” series of articles: The programming language will allow to define patterns like FindBugs and PMD that the compiler will check at compile time and which the VM checks at runtime to fix or at least warn about such security problems.
With tools like MoDisco and Moose, it’s possible to go one step further: It could analyze and display the code in ways that you haven’t seen before (think Code City) to find patterns in the code automatically and warn you about something that you might not have realized, yet.
For example, if you use a certain call sequence everywhere in your code but one place, it’s probably worth a look.
Of course, this begs for a way to add lots of additional information to source code. As I said before, we probably want better editors than the plain text editors we have today. It should be possible to include images and formulas in code. Wiki documentation. And things like “yeah, I know, this is different from the 365 other places!”
Sounds a bit like annotations but frankly, Java source code can just get you so far. DSLs come to mind but they don’t allow to extend them with arbitrary extra bits of information. It should be possible to overlay a DSL with another DSL so you can mix various information in one place.
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Posted by digulla 
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