Ask HN: Does such a programming language exist?
A language that is simple and readable like Python, is static and strongly typed, supports multi paradigm and leverages multi cores or has non blocking IO.
18 comments
Have you looked at Genie? https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Genie
I think this is as close as it gets in terms of syntax.
Only on HN would such a discovery be made of such a language.
The others that mention: Go, Nim, Crystal - all have valid bases to say it is "similar", but Python is Python and none of those 3 quite read like this one.
Interesting language though and it seems the author is active (with an edit in June 2015).
Only on HN would such a discovery be made of such a language.
The others that mention: Go, Nim, Crystal - all have valid bases to say it is "similar", but Python is Python and none of those 3 quite read like this one.
Interesting language though and it seems the author is active (with an edit in June 2015).
C# is gonna be your best bet.
And compiles to machine code. Please.
OCaml, with a caveat that it's "or has non-blocking I/O", though ostensibly SMP is on its way.
Wrong or right, I don't think that most people would consider ocaml simple to read.
I don’t know OCaml, but to the degree that it’s like F#, then it is the case that while it is not easy (at first), it is very simple. I can almost always understand any piece of ML code within a few passes, but that has a vanishingly low chance of happening with C# or VB, both of which I know extremely well.
N.B. I am using Rich Hickey’s definition of “simple” from his excellent talk “Simple Made Easy”.
N.B. I am using Rich Hickey’s definition of “simple” from his excellent talk “Simple Made Easy”.
Nim
FreeBASIC. It is simple, has OOP features, Strongly typed, it has threads and is compiled.
No. I assume by 'simple and readable,' you mean that you want whitespace to be significant. Most languages don't do the Pythonesque 'look! executable pseudocode! (hope you like underscores though!)' thing.
CoffeScript and it's variants too. However they're dynamically typed.
ADA.
Julia
Statically typed and simple generally means it's pretty hard to actually write reusable code and it's unlikely to "support multi-paradigm" very well. That said, "simple like Python" is an interesting phrase...
Why does static typing make it harder to write reusable code?
A simple type system makes it difficult to express useful invariants that are also flexible enough for the code to be reusable. Static typing makes it easier to write reusable code, provided the type language is sufficiently expressive.
What does invariants mean in this context?
Per wikipedia, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invariant_%28computer_science%...):
"In computer science, an invariant is a condition that can be relied upon to be true during execution of a program, or during some portion of it. It is a logical assertion that is held to always be true during a certain phase of execution. For example, a loop invariant is a condition that is true at the beginning and end of every execution of a loop."
I didn't mean it in any more specialized sense, except that there will always exist some invariants that can't be statically enforced (Halting problem). That said, there are lots of things that types can enforce - that's what types are good for (and they are spectacularly good things).
"In computer science, an invariant is a condition that can be relied upon to be true during execution of a program, or during some portion of it. It is a logical assertion that is held to always be true during a certain phase of execution. For example, a loop invariant is a condition that is true at the beginning and end of every execution of a loop."
I didn't mean it in any more specialized sense, except that there will always exist some invariants that can't be statically enforced (Halting problem). That said, there are lots of things that types can enforce - that's what types are good for (and they are spectacularly good things).
C is statically typed and (ostensibly) simple, and is the language used to write some of the most reused code there is. Do you mean something different by "reusable" from "easy to reuse?"
C is statically typed, and probably simple if python is... but C is not strongly typed. And in fact, much reuse in C is enabled precisely by subverting the type system (eg. cast to and from a void pointer for a generic structure). And still, in any significant C project there's a lot of code that gets rewritten that could live in a library in a less simple language (say, C++).
As another poster already said, Ada fulfills all of the requirements, and you can trivially write reusable code in it.
I don't know Ada well enough to say. Revisiting, I do think Ada generics are probably powerful enough to allow a large amount of safe reuse. I am most skeptical that it still counts as "simple".
I think Nim[1] or Crystal[2] may be a good fit.
[1] http://nim-lang.org/ [2] http://crystal-lang.org/
[1] http://nim-lang.org/ [2] http://crystal-lang.org/
Scala! It's mutli paradigm, it can be very simple to read, has amazing concurrency support and can utilize all the NIO goodies from the JVM.
Here's an example of me using it to make multithreaded NIO calls with XMPP:
But you don't get the nested craziness of ugly callbacks like you would in python or javascript (for instance).
Edit: If you really want whitespace, maybe F#?
http://www.tryfsharp.org/
Here's an example of me using it to make multithreaded NIO calls with XMPP:
val conn = Connection.create(getConnParams("username", "password"))
val result =
for {
(conn, myjid) <- ConnectionHelper.gchatConnect(conn, "xmppzExampleClient")
(conn, presence) <- conn.sendGet[Presence](Presence(from=Some(myjid), to=Some(tojid), presenceType=Some("probe")))
conn <- conn.send(Message(body=Some(msgtext), to=tojid, from=Some(myjid)))
conn <- conn.send(StreamEnd())
} yield conn
But you don't get the nested craziness of ugly callbacks like you would in python or javascript (for instance).
Edit: If you really want whitespace, maybe F#?
http://www.tryfsharp.org/
Maybe C# or the next release of TypeScript? You'd have asynchronous / await so async IO looks more like regular code than generators. Like Scala though there's still a lot of unnecessary syntax. AFAICT the answer to the parents question is 'No, but this would be good'
My two main languages I work in are C# and Scala. Hands down I prefer the latter. The only pro in the C# column is the fact that Visual Studio is (finally) pretty nice. Otherwise Scala is just better. So much better inference, pattern matching, currying, less syntactic noise, higher kinded types, implicit parameters, etc.
If you're coming from Python, you will be shocked by the compile times. However, the type system will likely save you time in the long run.
Go!
func factorial(x int) (result int) { if x == 0 { result = 1; } else { result = x * factorial(x - 1); } return; }
func factorial(x int) (result int) { if x == 0 { result = 1; } else { result = x * factorial(x - 1); } return; }
Believe it or not, Visual Basic is probably exactly what you want.
You may have already heard many good things about C#, but it turns out that VB is slightly more expressive and elegant than C# (I say this as someone that loves C#, and primarily programs using it along with F#).
Here is what VB offers:
* A syntax that almost looks like pseudo code
* A static type system with a kind of optional typing
* Object-oriented programming (classes, inheritance, ad-hoc polymorphism, etc.)
* Functional programming (closures, lambda expressions, parametric polymorphism (generics), etc.)
* Monad Comprehensions (LINQ)
* Type classes/traits (in the form of implicit conversions to an abstract class -- this is another kind of ad-hoc polymorphism, and something that not even F# can easily do)
* XML Literals
* Support for multicore programming in the form of syntactic sugar for writing asynchronous code in a familiar synchronous style (the `async` and `await` keywords)
* All of the .NET framework
* The Roslyn compiler infrastructure -- instead of the compiler being a black box, you can hook into the compiler pipeline
* It runs everywhere Mono runs.
You may have already heard many good things about C#, but it turns out that VB is slightly more expressive and elegant than C# (I say this as someone that loves C#, and primarily programs using it along with F#).
Here is what VB offers:
* A syntax that almost looks like pseudo code
* A static type system with a kind of optional typing
* Object-oriented programming (classes, inheritance, ad-hoc polymorphism, etc.)
* Functional programming (closures, lambda expressions, parametric polymorphism (generics), etc.)
* Monad Comprehensions (LINQ)
* Type classes/traits (in the form of implicit conversions to an abstract class -- this is another kind of ad-hoc polymorphism, and something that not even F# can easily do)
* XML Literals
* Support for multicore programming in the form of syntactic sugar for writing asynchronous code in a familiar synchronous style (the `async` and `await` keywords)
* All of the .NET framework
* The Roslyn compiler infrastructure -- instead of the compiler being a black box, you can hook into the compiler pipeline
* It runs everywhere Mono runs.
Haskell is all of these things, though it's library ecosystem has a pretty lengthy learning curve.
COBOL :)