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Comment by valenterry | Hacker News Reader

Dynamically typed and very flexible syntax with a lot of edge cases?

The language doesn't look bad in comparison to a lot of others, but the combination above is a nogo for me when it comes to any kind of production code.

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I mean that's probably because it's specifically geared towards exercises like this. Languages built for advent of code will probably prioritize stuffing as much syntactic sugar as possible rather than writing maintainable code

Your criticisms are valid, but only if you're approaching it from the perspective of using it for a full-fledged project.

More likely use cases are quick scripts you wanna write or little thought experiments you wanna try out. For that, it's likely a great choice of language

Yeah that makes sense.

Agreed. I don’t mind dynamic typing at all, particularly when facilities exist to establish contracts around what the data you’re passing around looks like. But I don’t think this is a brilliant solution to Python’s problems. Python has issues, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a very very mature language without a lot of WTF moments. On the flip side, a brand new language with this level of freedom means you really need to sit down and grok everything from the inventors perspective before you can be proficient. You need to absorb the entire language for it to work. Meanwhile, and I’m hesitant to beat this drum, a lisp like Clojure is not at all confusing or unclear. The syntax might be hard to grok initially, and the short function names or departure to literal functional programming might throw you off, but after that you realize the air is crisp. The language and stdlib are small and relatively old for a reason - the ecosystem fosters this. You can do and build anything without fuss. It’s wonderful.

This language isn't an attempt to solve Python's problems. At best it's an attempt to get around some minor speed bumps I personally experience when writing short Python scripts. I did not create this language with the expectation or hope that even a single other person in the world would want to learn it, much less become proficient. Clojure is a great language! It's just that I, personally, need more mental effort to translate thoughts to code using prefix notation and other aspects of Lisp syntax, and decided that reducing that kind of mental effort for myself was a goal of this language.

Author here. FWIW I 100% agree with your assessment. This would be a horrible choice for anything resembling production code and I hope nobody considers it. I'm not really even sure I'd recommend anybody other than me use the language for anything; there are a lot of decisions informed by how I, specifically, think about and write code. For me, this language works well when I want to write scripts that are <100 lines or so, and for that alone I think it's achieved its purpose. I think of it as a "home-cooked" programming language, a la <https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/>.

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