Ask HN: What “new” programming languages will you be using in 2017

Cheylon and Scala seemed better to me when they started. But it seems Kotlin is what Java really should have been, hehe :)

How do you define new? I'd say ES6 if that counts.

This attitude happens all the time FP in the job comes up and it essentially means the parent commenter's company has no time or resources for training or mentoring.

NoRedInk (among other companies) use non-mainstream FP languages and hire juniors all the time. Turns out that people can learn things quickly if they're smart (which is why you hired them, I hope) and are given mentorship.

For packages with default export, you can use synthetic imports options in tsconfig.

For non-js imports, you can create global module declarations (like the below snippet):

declare module "*.css" { const value: any; export { value }; export default value; }

But you will still need to use some bundler tool like webpack. It will just stop TypeScript from complaining.

Type definitions are the biggest issue even today, but things are much better now. Most popular npm packages already have type definitions, but if you need some exotic package, then you can write your own defnitions (probably only necessary bits).

Rust: Because I like the idea of zero-cost abstractions in a rich ML-like data-oriented language that has modern facilities such as pattern matching, abstract data types, generics, hygienic macros and package management, without the legacy baggage of C++.

However, I think Rust went overboard with the line noise; the combination of very terse keywords, and a decision to rely on punctuation more so than keywords, means that it's a very dense, gnarly language.

Rust is also notoriously slow to compile, which worries me.

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Swift: For the above reason, I really want to explore Swift. For me, Swift has pretty much the ideal syntax. As with Rust, you have Pattern matching, abstract data types and generics, but its designers has also spent a lot of time on ergonomics, and aren't afraid of making backwards-incompatible changes (which, this early in a language's life, I think is a good thing).

But I'm worried that the ecosystem and standard libary are not there yet for general-purpose development outside the realm of iOS/macOS GUI apps.

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Nim: It's particularly interesting in that it's managed to retain a superb level of performance with a minimal, highly expressive, highly readable, fairly unintrusive syntax that combines the best of Turbo Pascal and Python. I'm less concerned about the fact that it's garbage-collected.

I'm admittedly less enamoured about some of Nim's {.weird syntax choices.}, and there are clear signs, in Nim's suprisingly huge feature set, that it was designed by a single person who had sudden ideas, implemented them about 80% of the way, and ended up with everything but the kitchen sink, without really considering the complexity or bewildering array of semantics that were incurred along the way — so many pragmas! Nim could do with a cleanup. I'm also disappointed that classical OO inheritance was kept.

That said, Nim looks terrific, and I hope to find a project to use it with.

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I'm also hoping that Jonathan Blow's Jai language sees a release this year, because it looks quite exciting.