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Programming languages with small surface area

by orangetuba on 11/17/22, 4:48 PM with 17 comments

• by karmakaze on 11/30/22, 11:00 AM

  F#/OCaml may not have a small total surface area (I'm not that deep in it), but you can do a whole lot knowing basic constructions.

  If you haven't used a functional language there's an alternative approach without the cognitive overhead of thinking about statements executing in time (most of the time). For a non-static typed example, Elixir (but that usually also brings in Phoenix framework). Zig is another interesting one for different reasons.

• by hazelnut-tree on 11/17/22, 7:42 PM

  There are not many languages (in active use) with a small surface area. Go is small, Lua is another. However, a small language does not always mean simple - you may still encounter code that is difficult to unravel.

  New programming languages tend to range from medium-to-large in size.

  Here are number of keywords in some languages. Note: this is a bit of a blunt measure of a language's size so you may not consider it a measure of small surface area:

  - Lua (21 keywords)

  - Go (25 keywords)

  - Julia (30+ keywords)

  - Python (30+ keywords)

  - Javascript (30+ keywords)

  - Ruby (40+ keywords)

  - Crystal (50+ keywords)

  - Rust (50+ keywords)

  - Nim (60+ keywords)

  - C# (70+ keywords)

  - PHP (70+ keywords)

  Languages still in development

  - Odin (30+ keywords)

  - V lang (40+ keywords)

  - Zig (40+ keywords)

• by Qem on 11/18/22, 1:18 PM

  In terms of surface area, I think is hard to beat languages in the Smalltalk family. Smalltalk has only six reserved words: true , false , nil , self , super and thisContext. To emphasize the simplicity, there is even a smalltalk postcard to show the whole syntax fits on it. See https://richardeng.medium.com/syntax-on-a-post-card-cb6d85fa...

  I think this postcard remark may be a bit misleading sometimes, as in practice the complexity is shifted from syntax to the large class library in the system image, that packs a lot of functionality. But yet the environment is sweet and has great discoverability, with functionality like search by example. See https://youtu.be/HOuZyOKa91o

  The Smalltalk flavor I strongly recommend is Pharo. There's a MOOC[1] on it, and there are several free books that cover the basics of the language itself[2][3], data visualisation[4] and numeric stuff[5]. [1]. https://mooc.pharo.org/ [2]. https://github.com/SquareBracketAssociates/PharoByExample9/r... [3]. https://books.pharo.org/deep-into-pharo/ [4]. http://agilevisualization.com/ [5]. https://books.pharo.org/numerical-methods/

• by tionate on 11/18/22, 7:49 AM

  Clojure is tiny in that there are very few special forms (less than 20 according to [0]) and most things are just plain functions.

  More importantly, it is developed extremely conservatively which means

  1) you don’t need to learn the syntax/feature of the month (like eg javascript/python)

  2) the code you wrote a decade ago will still work.

  That said, it does sit on top of Java/JS so you can access those parts easily if you need to.

  [0]: https://clojure.org/reference/special_forms

• by Jtsummers on 11/17/22, 5:26 PM

  Forth, Lua (with LuaJIT pretty quick), Scheme, Pascal, probably a lot more.

• by tored on 11/18/22, 11:57 AM

  There are many BASIC dialects with a small surface area. The one I use is PureBasic, however it is commercial.

• by aristofun on 11/17/22, 6:07 PM

  Ruby, Typescript

• by huqedato on 11/20/22, 1:06 AM

  Elixir.