Comment by Chris_Newton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Chris_Newton | Hacker News Reader

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> At this point in computing history, your language needs a stronger raison d'être than "Python isn't statically typed, and C++ has awkward syntax!"

True, but for all the rapid development in programming languages at the moment, we still don't actually have (AFAIK) a general purpose programming language that has simple, clean syntax à la Python, a static type system that covers all the basics but doesn't get too clever/complicated for everyday use, and good performance.

This always seems strange to me, given that all the necessary ingredients are widely available in other languages and I see no inherent difficulty in combining them. I suppose industrial forces already have "good enough" languages and academic forces are more interested in pushing the frontiers in languages like Haskell. That probably doesn't leave a lot of people with the required skills, time and inclination to work on a solid, practical, boring tool that just gets the job done a bit better than anything we have today but without trying to somehow reshape the entire programming industry and become the Next Big Thing.

SML/Ocaml:

- Rapid development

- Clean syntax

- Static type system

- Good performance

- Practical, not about pushing boundaries

SML especially, is a very stable, simple, and well thought out language.

AliceML adds distributed programming, constraint programming, lazy evaluation, plus more.

http://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/alice/

While AliceML is quite nice, the main advantage that SML has over the other major ML-family languages is, IMHO, that it's simple, well-defined, and has several fairly-compatible and high quality implementations.

Yep. Alice is a superset of SML. I have them both running under Emacs and I have to do a double take when something doesn't work in Alice, just to discover it was SMLNJ that I was running.

The trouble is, I would love to have a language with properly controlled side effects and the basic functional goodies, but for real world use I'm not aware of any functional language that doesn't also make something basic much harder than imperative languages do.

If I could have a language with the functional toys of an ML or a Haskell, but where the impure side of things was as easy to write as the pure computations, that would be great. But for that to happen, I suspect there needs to be a dramatic shift in the way effectful code is written, in the same way that type inference practically eliminated all the syntactic overheads we might otherwise have assumed were necessary with a static type system.

I've seen a lot of research in this area, and there's huge potential in some of the ideas being tried out in languages like Haskell, but to my knowledge no-one has really hit anywhere near the sweet spot I'm looking for in a production language yet.

[...] where the impure side of things was as easy to write as the pure computations, that would be great.

From your post, I'm going to assume that you haven't used the languages I'm talking about; sorry if I misread that. SML/Ocaml/F# are not purely functional languages, so side effects work just like you'd expect coming from C/Python/etc. The language encourages functional programming (for example, variables are immutable by default), but imperative code is far from difficult to write. I highly recommend you try one of these languages. They may just be what your looking for.

I have some experience with both SML and OCaml, though it is quite limited.

Perhaps it's either my background writing a lot of fairly mathematical code or simply my own ignorance, but I always found little things like having to distinguish * and *. operators in OCaml rather awkward. Granted, it beats M.times(a).plus(b), but it's the sort of slightly clunky blemish that puts me off, and it betrays a certain lack of power in the underlying model. (Haskell almost has the opposite problem, with a type system that seems able to do almost anything, but also having all the complexity that inherently comes with that.)

Type classes may come to OCaml one day. That would solve it.

haXe seems to come within inches of your idea:

Inferred static compilation for multiple VM/source targets with a "trapdoor" into the target's dynamic typesystem. JS-like syntax. Macro system(still in development but usable). Compiles to reasonably performant C++, although matching hand-written C++ performance is not a goal.

I have been using it for several years now with the Flash/JS targets.

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