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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

I want compiled Python with strong types. All the batteries of Python included. And runs at C speed. Go feels like C and Python had a baby except the baby looks more like C and less like Python.

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Have you looked at Nim? Python-like syntax, compiles to C, and a considerably sized stdlib (http, parsing, channels)

https://nim-lang.org/

Nim is an impressive undertaking, though I was sheepishly overwhelmed when I tried using it for a quick project and realized I might have to spend 30 more minutes reading the docs than writing cowboy code. It's quite a big language: https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html

Would love to take a more serious look later.

I can recommend a look at Crystal also, although Crystal is not even 1.0

Between the two I found I needed much less referencing with Crystal, and when I did, I found it more intuitive, well described and easier to remember and apply the same concepts in other places.

https://crystal-lang.org/reference/index.html

Many people just don’t understand the joy of working with something like python or ruby. Maybe they haven’t had an immersive experience with an “a ha!” moment. Coming from basic and similar languages to java, then later to jruby and ruby, and now back to java I have to say it depresses me how much more I enjoy some languages and technologies over others. I wish I could feel equally excited and happy to work in them.

100%, being productive is addicting and fun. Laboring through for-loops 80th time in a the day is something for sadist purists, not me.

As a non-expert at Go, I would have loved classic OOP + batteries included Python and remove the curly braces. Perfect.

I stopped missing Python once I found Scala. It may not quite be C speed, but it's fast enough (orders of magnitude faster than Python, good enough for doing casual linear algebra in). Standard library is probably smaller than Python's, but you don't need it because the JVM world has really good dependency management (Maven).

Kotlin pretty much did this for me. I'm no longer interested in writing Python or Go because Kotlin is better than both in every dimension that matters to me personally. i.e power/expressiveness, performance and runtime/ecosystem quality.

Heh yeah fair enough. I find Kotlin infuriating to work in (far more so than many objectively worse languages) because it's such a step backwards from Scala, but if I didn't know what I was missing then I'd probably feel the same way.

I actually used Scala before Kotlin. I get what you mean in Kotlin being less powerful than Scala but for me this has turned out to be a good thing in bigger projects. Kotlin provides enough power to get the job done without giving people too much rope to hang themselves with.

For me it's not about power, it's about consistency. Scala has a couple of general concepts that get applied to everything. Kotlin seems to have a new ad-hoc way of doing every different thing. E.g. my teammate just rewrote some code to use a Scala-style IO type rather than suspend functions because none of us could understand which coroutine context was being used where.

Mypy with python’s new static types is a fantastic replacement for “real” types. The types mostly don’t exist at runtime (except for some rare cases like how dataclass handles ClassVar variables) but they’ll take you very far during development time, especially paired with a language server like Microsoft’s Pylance.

It won't be ready for production use for a while, but https://github.com/python/mypy/tree/master/mypyc is being worked on.