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Ask HN: What programming language has you really excited lately, and why?

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Re: Ask HN: What programming language has you really excited lately, and why?

#51
Rust: low level performance, high level safety, functional, AMAZING community

Elm: beautiful front-end development in a tough to navigate JS world

Elixir: functional back-end programming on top of the BEAM VM

ES 2015 & node.js: I really enjoy and appreciate a language growing in the ways JS has and I love seeing the frameworks influence and borrow from one another (ember, react, angular). While the ecosystem is sometimes annoying, it's been a joy to see the evolution and natural selection of tools and libraries (e.g. flux, alt, flummox, and eventually redux coming out on top...for now)

Re: Ask HN: What programming language has you really excited lately, and why?

#53

JS ES2015. The syntax looks awful at first glance, but after heavily using it, there's much more power to this language now.

I'm in this camp as well. I've always enjoyed JS because I feel like I can get stuff done so much quicker. With ES6/2015, now I feel like it's far more powerful, elegant and fun to use.

Re: Ask HN: What programming language has you really excited lately, and why?

#54
None.

That's why I've been developing my own language (http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/tutorials/TOC.html). It isn't ready yet: there are still bugs in the IDE, and without a compiler it's slow. After fixing these problems, I also want to look at new ways to do graph processing. Then, I'll think about releasing it, if there's enough interest. Let me know what you think.

Features: visual, dataflow, HM type inference while editing, homoiconic, can call Lisp and callable from Lisp.

Re: Ask HN: What programming language has you really excited lately, and why?

#55
post #48
post #18

Lately? C# triggered by: - Open sourcing of .NET - Open Sourcing of Xamarin I want to live in a world where writing mobile apps for multiple platforms with a single codebase becomes the de-facto way of doing things. C#/Xamarin seems like the only viable way to achieve that.

What about react native?

React Native is "learn once, write everywhere" as opposed to "write once, run everywhere."

Re: Ask HN: What programming language has you really excited lately, and why?

#56

Crystal: Syntax inspired by Ruby, static types and compiled by LLVM. The standard library is mostly similar to Ruby (I'd say it's better. For example it rack-like functionality and websockets built-in). It's getting a lot of traction in the community.

Crystal looks interesting, but is it usable in production? Any examples of people using it?

Sidekiq was recently ported over to crystal and the speedups and memory usage improvements are amazing. There's also an officially supported heroku-buildpack so it can be deployed easily.

But there's a lot of breaking changes in the language (0.18 was released a few days ago with a few breaking changes). I would not use it for a long term project (yet). But for some personal project or prototypes, for example which you'd quickly set using Ruby/Sinatra, I'd choose Crystal/Kemal.

Re: Ask HN: What programming language has you really excited lately, and why?

#58

Clojure. Particularly with Paredit mode in Emacs. The experience of manipulating semantic units of code vs. editing text is a joy and I really, really miss it when I return to e.g. Python.

I really like parinfer for this, too. After switching to it, I've had a great time using it.

Re: Ask HN: What programming language has you really excited lately, and why?

#59
I guess you were hoping for new cutting edge stuff, but I've been really enjoying Common Lisp.

I've used it for a bunch of small projects the last year or so, and just have a ton of fun. In particular, it has surprisingly good bindings to graphics libraries like Qt, SDL, and OpenGL, and it's super easy to get animations and graphical apps up and running quickly.

The compilers are great for such a high level language, and it's significantly faster than Python, which was my preferred language before CL. It doesn't beat the raw speed of C, but I rarely need that anyway. As an example, I just wrote a cheesy, animated FFT visualization and full screen at 2560x1440 it gets 90+ fps with no attempt to optimize on my part, except turning up the default optimization level. https://github.com/jl2/qt-fft-viz

The REPL and code reloading makes iterating on ideas really fast, and I find I experiment more in CL because it's just easier.

Re: Ask HN: What programming language has you really excited lately, and why?

#60
Rust: Which everyone seems to know about and I'm sure lots of people will be able to explain why.

So I'll focus on ... Haxe: Which is known in a few circles, but If I talk to a random person about it they've never heard of it.

Haxe is a garbage collected strictly typed compiled language with type inference. It compiles to a variety of platforms including C++, Javascript, Flash Bytecode, Neko VM bytecode, even PHP. More recently it has been growing support for C#, java, python and lua.

It's just a nice language to use. A combination of the cool features like pattern matching case statements, and the simple tidiness of the basics.

    for (minion in party) {
      minion.jumpToTheLeft();
    }
Just little things like not having 'for (var minion in party)'. It clears the clutter. while still protecting you.

In many respects, when compiling to JavaScript, it serves the niche that Dart and Typescript aim at. I think the fact that it is independent should not be underestimated. Google people tend to use Dart, Microsoft people use TypeScript. Haxe is not on a 'side' people use it because of what it is, not who made it. I'm rather against provenance as a reason to use a language.

The best way to get a good feel for Haxe is to go to http://try.haxe.org and look-at/run some of the examples.

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