Back onto the couch it goes!

"Hmm… interests…" It bounces its leg as it thinks.

"…I think I quite like reading, and writing, and music…"

"I… do some computer programming, sometimes?"

Sable blinks for a moment. She's never seen a kid into programming that young before.

Then she grins.

"Well imagine that! I like those too, and I program for a living! What language do you like?"

Oh yay, this is continuing to be an excellent person!

"Well, I quite like—"

…This is 2008. When did Rust get released?

Not 2008, that's for sure.

Crap, it's been paused for a bit too long. What other languages does it like?

"—Well, C-Sharp is decent, but I do wish it had real memory management, and better error handling—I don't know much C, maybe it's more like that, but that hasn't been my experience. Something Functional would be amazing, but it doesn't feel like anyone's doing anything interesting with that lately, and I haven't learned any Lisp."

"Ooh, yeah, C-Sharp does show off some interesting features, but it absolutely doesn't have memory management worth anything. C's error-handling is definitely not very inspiring. I love Lisp, but I wish something managed to combine modern advanced data structures and functional programming with the best practices in memory management and direct integration with the kind of optimizations you can get in modern C compilers. But a Lisp like that doesn't exist, and I haven't felt motivated enough to try to make one yet."

Really impressively precocious little girl. She is surprised to have a conversation about comparative language merits with a ten-year-old. 

"Oooh, I wonder how hard that would be? I've never tried making a new low-level language."

"Never done it before, but it could be fun to learn. Have to plan it out in a lot of detail first, though."

It doesn't really talk like a child. It talks like it's on her level. Really smart kid.

And then there's a very faint chime from her watch. "Tea should be ready, I think."

"Oh, yay!"

It removes the teabag from the mug, then looks up at Sable questioningly.

"Where should I put this?"

"Edge of the plate's fine for now and I'll handle it as we get ready to head out, or I could take it back to the kitchen now if you'd rather."

"…Edge of the plate is fine."

It squeezes the bag lightly over the mug, in order to keep it from dripping, then sets it on the edge of the plate.

It then stares at the mug, occasionally blowing on it but not drinking any.

"Any thoughts for features you wanna see in a language, Mae?" she asks while it presumably waits for its tea to cool.

Oh gosh, that sure is a lot of planning ahead, for someone she's just met. She's probably just making conversation, Mae, don't overcomplicate things.

"Well, strong typing is obviously important, and there are some specific features I like from some languages, like—" wait, shit, tuples weren't in C# in 2008, were they? "—like Pythons Tuples. What I'd really love is explicit error handling, where a method either can or can't return an error, and the method calling it has to explicitly handle or propagate it, instead of awful try/catch statements. Of course, then you'd have to have a lot of language features for easily handling stuff like that—especially if you want to enforce memory-safety."

Oh look, its tea is cool enough to drink, now! It takes a sip.

"How about you? What sorts of features are important to you in a language? Or, which ones do you wish you had access to?"