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Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I am wrong but I feel like the strength of Python is writing Python and the arguable weakness of Python is it's speed and concurrency.

Many of these Python built languages seem to flip it around and build on the weaknesses of Python and not build on Python's strengths.

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As a Python programmer, the appeal of the Haskell family seems to be correctness -- I've come to think of Python as a "surprisingly typed" language. This particular language looks like it has Haskelly syntax without the type system. I'd be most interested in the latter; I'd be willing to trade off performance in some places for stronger ability to reason about types. I envision a pure, strongly typed language with strict evaluation, that looks like Python to the rest of my code base.

Have you tried Python's type hints with Mypy, and so you have any thoughts on it?

I haven't yet -- type annotations in Python 3 still don't seem to have stabilized. Although I admit I haven't looked too deeply into it, I know a bunch of new stuff landed in 3.6. The appeal of a library that adds a functional layer on top of Python is that it partitions "new stuff" from "old stuff". It seems easier to tear out and reimplement if we screw it up, versus type annotations diffusing out into the rest of our codebase.

FWIW I tried it on a relatively new 10K line project and gave up, because it doesn't play well with metaprogramming. I consider metaprogramming to be part of Python, so mypy and statically typed Python are really different languages with less power IMO. And of course the mypy author knew that -- that's why he gave it a different name.

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/11/30.html

update here: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/01/06.html

I'm not claiming my experience generalizes... if you have a lot of Java-like code you can probably use mypy. Bizarrely, some people do actually have a lot of Java-like Python code.

I've used typehints to write a compiler but with my own small homegrown annotations and it worked really well. It feels natural coming from languages with similar syntax like rust and the like. Cool integrates well with pycharm too

Maybe you should try dogelang (dg). That's all the Haskell syntax goodness with the Python typesystem :D

Well, my boss did used to own a Shiba Inu, so I think it's inevitable once he finds out about dg :)

The other strength of Python (as I'm sure you're aware) is its ecosystem. It's not clear to me to what extent imports work with Lambdascript but access to them (including the scientific stack) seems to be an explicit goal of, say, Hylang.

I used Python for 6 years, but whenever I go back, I miss the expressiveness and safety offered by other languages. I frequently "forced" into using Python when libraries in languages I prefer (Scala, Haskell) just aren't available, but I can't justify reimplementing them.

Doesn't Scala use Java libraries? I'd be very surprised if availability of libraries for the JVM is significantly less than that of Python.

Since at least some of the backend programmers are language designers, the vm code might be equally nice to play with, seperate from runtime performance issues.

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