Ask HN: Which alternative to Python for personnal use would you recommend?

Racket and Clojure are, in my opinion, well-designed, pragmatic languages that get to the point quickly and elegantly.

Clojure is a great opinionated functional language with a healthy ecosystem and a real job market. I now solve Advent of Code-style puzzles mainly in Clojure. Its only significant drawback, which is also its biggest feature, is the JVM. While it gives you interop with Java's ecosystem and lets you benifit from one of the fastest GC runtimes, it can leak its quirks into your program.

If interpreter start-up times are a concern, Babashka is an alternative Clojure interpreter based on GraalVM, with a startup time of about 30ms, making it perfect for UNIX scripting with a real programming language. For browser or Node dev, ClojureScript is an official dialect with a few minimal compromises given its runtime.

It also includes many useful additions like Actor concurrency model, transducers, multimethods, records, and EDN (Extendible Data Notation).

The only real objection is that Clojure isn't quite a Lisp, deviating from the definition in key ways, such as not using cons cells. However, this is not a concern outside an educational context.

Racket is essentially a modern Scheme dialect, adding many of its own niceties while not strictly following RnRS standards. It has an excellent contract typing system, #lang feature that allows you to define your own DSLs, tools for lazy and reactive programming, and a batteries-included standard library with plotting, GUI, statistics, and more, all while still being a true Scheme, which igves you other neat features like numerical tower, TCO, first class continuations, and with #lang and other interop tools, the ability to reuse run most normal Scheme code. Fun fact: HackerNews is written in Arc, a Lisp dialect, now implemented as within Racket.

Both languages have uniquely excellent documentation, use the regular and flexible syntax of S-expressions, and possess powerful macro systems. Both are equally useful and fun tools.

If you're looking for a high-level scripting language for small projects that you keep to yourself, Ruby is the obvious alternative to Python. Lua not so much - it's fine when embedded but doesn't have the ecosystem for standalone use.

However, if you want to make programs for others to download and use, I'd recommend a language that can be compiled into easily-distributable binaries. As long as the overhead of a garbage collector is acceptable, Go is the clear favourite here.

If you are chasing the best performances for desktop applications. You shouldn't really look at Python alternatives. In my opinion, JavaScript and Chrome performs quite well in practice. Plenty of successful apps use that kind of stack with good performances.

CLI in JavaScript wouldn't be my first choice, Python would, but some people do that too.

If you want to take a break from the languages at work, maybe learn a language for fun. Ruby is great and fun to learn. Golang is quite quick to learn if you don't have much time. Rust is my personal favourite but it's more challenging. And then you have all those exotic programming languages or some with different paradigms.

Rust. Adequate for fun little projects on the side; I find the extra setup time pays itself off in bug prevention and diagnosis quickly, even on small projects. I feel confident my Rust code will have few runtime errors, mutations are predictable etc, while I know my Python code is a minefield, even with precautions like typing. Overall reasons I prefer Rust as a default over Python for most projects:

  - Better (best IMO) official tools
  - Catch many error types at compile time
  - Predictable mutation/pass-by-value vs ref
  - No speed limits
  - Easy to distribute (compared to Python)

All the downsides you've heard about rust are probably true. But when you weigh it as a whole and look at the downsides of other tools, IMO rust rises to the top for many uses.

Kotlin is IMO kind of a mess; too many Javas complications. I may be biased by only having used it for Android.

Important caveat: You mentioned you focus on backends. I can't recommend rust for that due to the immature ecosystem; if you are looking for something like Flask, it is fine. If you want a Django/Rails/Laravel analog, there is nothing that exists on that tier. I recommended it because you're looking for something more general.

There's also Crystal for the compiled usecase.