languages I played with in 2024

gleam

Nice, simple language with stellar tooling. Still very young, interested to see where it goes!

rust

Nice, complicated language with stellar tooling. Got further into it this time round (stressed myself out learning it prior), but stopped at macros? concurrency? (the hard stuff). Probably overkill for me, personally.

elixir

First eye-opener was pattern matching directly in the function’s parameter list - quite a nice alternative to writing explicit control flow. Wasn’t a huge fan of the numerous data structures (when do I use maps vs keyword lists?) and I found some of the syntax hard to remember (when do I use arrows? atoms? colons). I know some of these questions have straightforward answers, but it wasn’t immediately intuitive and I don’t like having to keep that kind of stuff in the forefront of my brain. Not a huge fan of some parts of the API being seemingly “inconsistent” (due to Erlang, but I know Erlang interop is supposed to one of the best parts?)

ocaml

I hate it and can’t seem to get into it. Resources are kind of scarce, the ecosystem seems like a mess

rescript

On its own, the language (well, dialect) seems ok, but docs aren’t quite there yet - hit a roadblock when I actually tried to start a React project with it (asked me to run Demo.mjs or something but the npx scaffolding doesn’t even create one). Unless I read something in the docs incorrectly, but I’m fairly certain I didn’t. (Also, why is there Belt vs Js vs Core…)

update (2024-01-03): never mind, I suck at reading docs

scala

Man, idk. I really, really wish I liked this one, if only for the fact that there seem to be so many FP resources for it. Unfortunately, it seems like Scala 2 -> 3 was a huge jump, and many of those resources are written for Scala 2. Even the official resources are guilty of this - often I’ll search for something, click on the link, and it’ll have a link saying “There’s an updated version of this page”. Kind of annoying.

update (2024-01-03): never mind, I’ll give it another go

haskell

Struggled with the tooling. Can’t count how many times I had to ghc nuke. Re: the language itself - this one will probably be a years-long endeavour. Currently on hold, in favor of:

update (2024-01-03): never mind, Haskell (and by extension, Purescript) is really, really hard and it’ll take me forever to get anywhere with this language (I got up to monad transformers and things have stopped making sense. Also, what is up with the record story in Haskell?). Treating it as an academic exercise has not worked, and things are not fun anymore. Maybe one day…

purescript

Also struggled with this one at first. The documentation is kind of scarce - I hope one day, every language has a tutorial in the form of “a tour of”. But, I landed on a book I’m enjoying, and things are… progressing. The error messages from the compiler seem slightly more helpful than Haskell’s, so the feedback loop is just better. I’m enjoying it, and may head back to learn Haskell properly when this is done

lean

AMAZING, amazing dx. The interactive development is just chefs kiss. I doubt I’ll end up getting anything done with this one, since most of its use cases seem to be mostly academic in nature, but I’ll keep my eye on it for sure.

unison

Seems really interesting? The development workflow is a huge paradigm shift. Probably won’t ever have a need for the distributed code management but I’ll definitely keep watching this one too.