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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.)