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Comment by qwertyuiop924 | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the few JS compiled languages that interest me: Some of these languages add a very thin syntactic layer on Javascript and maybe a type system. If I wanted Javascript, I'd use Javascript, and if I wanted types, I'd use Flow, not a new programming language that's kinda-sorta-not-really JS.

That leaves this, Clojurescript, and SPOCK as the only really interesting projects. They all have runtimes that are unpleasantly large (well, Buckle may not), but that's the price of a new language.

However, Clojurescript leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and SPOCK stresses javascript implementations in interesting ways. I'm not really a fan of OCaml, but Buckle looks interesting, and more enjoyable/practical than the other two.

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I bet you heard about Elm and purescript?

Forgot about those. Yeah, they're on the list. Elm seems to be the most practical of the lot, and also one of the nicest to program in.

I've been using Elm for the last 2 weeks on a project and I love it. I still get slapped around all the time by the compiler, but at least I know my program won't have any run-time exceptions.

If you like Elm, you will like Buckle too! we have a much faster compiler, and you can compile it into native code as a bonus : )

Took more than 10 seconds to find this link:

http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/spock

I've been meaning to get into ClojureScript. Can you elaborate on why it leaves a bad taste in your mouth?

Well, first off, I don't really like Java or the JVM. That in itself is a pretty strong reason to not get into Clojure.

Secondly, I don't really like Clojure as a language: It's strongly opinionated, and made some unorthodox (for a lisp) design choices which I dislike.

Finally, Clojurescript is really heavyweight, dragging along not only its own runtime, but also the google closure library and compiler, making the entire system more complex than it needed to be (was there any reason we needed to have a closure dependancy?).

Don't get me wrong, Clojure isn't an objectively bad language, it's just a language I personally dislike. If you have similar tastes to me, you may not like it either. OTOH, You may thibk it's The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread (TM). That's fine, I just won't agree.

Not an expert, but having dabbled in cljs, I think this misrepresents it. The closure dependency makes things arguably heavier at dev time, but at compile time it allows for a lot of dead code elimination and other optimization that makes the actual output much more light weight. It doesn't slow down development, but allows for a much better product to be deployed.

Fair enough. However, as I've mentioned, there are other reasons I dislike clojure.

redhat's ceylon looks good too: http://ceylon-lang.org/

I guess... but it's advertising to large teams, it seems java-oriented (so if I wanted that sort of thing, I could use Clojure), it's pushing an IDE, and it's from Red Hat, a company that has given us such marvellous technologies as networkmanager, rpm, dbus, systemtap, and systemd - so while not an awful track record, not exactly picking all winners either.

All in all, kind of neat, but that is just way too many red flags for me to say I'm bursting with anticipation to use it.

agreed about the red flags, but the actual language looks very tastefully designed and pleasant to use.

I suppose. But I'm not really the target audience: I'm more comfortable in Scheme than Haskell, and I'm willing to forgive JS most of its warts (especially since it's got proper HOF (better than Python and Ruby, anyways), and is getting TCO. It even has a macro system, courtesy of sweet.js (even if it is only a limited pattern-matching one, as opposed to the imperative systems of Lisp and most Schemes)).

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