Clojurians Log v2

Are there any new programming languages that caught your attention for being innovative in making programming simpler? Clojure was a significant mental shift for me personally, and really brought me back the joy of programming. But Clojure is mostly done, are there any new ideas lately? (Plz no Rust, that’s not simpler by any measure, in my opinion. Better performance and correctness — maybe)

not new (it's become more popular recently) and it's not turing complete, but datalog is interesting

@timur058 As an alternative to Rust, I've heard that Zig is the "simple" equivalent (where Go = easy, garbage collected and Rust is performant, but quite complex)

I have not tried it though

zig is a simpler c (more internally consistent, no preprocessor, instead you use the full language at compile time)

@borkdude from what I’ve seen, Zig is very low-level (does not even have any built-in or “official” way to do polymorphism). So I agree that the language is simple, but it hardly makes programming simpler, in my opinion (like Clojure’s fearless concurrency, persistent data structures, package management, plain data philosophy did)

it does have built in polymorphism, a function can take a type as its first argument

I mean, in the same domain of low level programming as Rust

not programming in general

I've been using zig a lot lately, zig is to c as rust is to c++ in many ways

I am doing Rust right now, but I feel like I'm jumping through lots of hoops to get stuff done

Curious about Zig

the language is still pre-1.0, but I think the final design is going in good directions

while there's no gc out of the box, ArrayList, HashMap, etc. are polymorphic and take an "allocator" as an argument, that allocator could be a gc

but most people using zig are not looking to use gc

Ok, but as for high level programming languages that compete with Clojure in "simplicity", not sure if I know any good competitors

to the original question, i think Typescript could fit that bill. a new language, innovative. some dimensions it could be simpler, some not

the old programming languages ml and scheme are very simple (and big influences on clojure)

definitely simpler than clojure, but less usable in mainstream projects

I tried some golang during the Christmas break. As a language it's quite limited, but I got something working relatively more quickly than say Rust. It may become a guilty pleasure. For years I've ignored it because it's kind of an anti-FP language.

It was quite easy to get it to behave like a dynamically typed language

E.g. I serialized results from sqlite to JSON dynamically without writing a ton of typed boilerplate

@noisesmith > it does have built in polymorphism, a function can take a type as its first argument I might be mistaken, but that does not work like run-time polymorphism (same way C++ virtual functions or Java interfaces work), does it? To do polymorphism, your types have to contain the “hand-coded” vtable — at least it’s what I understood from skimming.

I'm thinking of things like ArrayList where it has a constructur taking a type as an argument, returning the concrete type

that's a form of polymorphism (but not runtime polymorphism unless you make a vtable, it's true)

but eg. ml also lacks straightforward runtime polymorphism, and I consider it a cromulent high level language

Not "new new", but elm

far fewer constructs and explicitly targeted at one specific kind of application

I was developing in Elm for a few years and there are many ways in which it’s simple, but also many of its “simple” features are more “easy” in the simple vs easy sense. It uses a deeply coupled web framework, for instance, that uses an FFI that’s only available to the compiler authors. This framework is well-designed, but highly coupled.