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Ask HN: What is a programming language that you don't use at work but enjoy?

by dondraper36 on 10/22/24, 7:10 PM with 26 comments

• by ocean_moist on 10/22/24, 7:14 PM

  BQN[1] (an APL variant). There is something really beautiful/elegant to me about composing higher order functions in a purely point free way. Array programming is a nice application of this, and this one has the best ergonomics.

  [1] https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/

• by ironlake on 10/22/24, 8:31 PM

  Forth. I learned it very late in my programming career which started with Java. It just feels like home in a way that no other language ever has.

  Mostly useless tho

• by sk11001 on 10/22/24, 7:21 PM

  Go is lovely - it’s super pragmatic and things just work.

• by jarl-ragnar on 10/22/24, 7:52 PM

  Clojurescript. I used it to build an MVP proof of concept for work and now have to watch a small team re-write it using Typescript and Angular

  They’re still not at feature parity with 2x the team, 2x the time and 3x the lines of code.

• by tnvmadhav on 10/23/24, 5:26 PM

  I don't currently use Python at work. I freaking love it.

• by numerosix on 10/23/24, 6:02 PM

  Ada, from 8bits microcontrollers to amd64 and arm too... really portable, so readable and robust, strong typed, and great community too.

• by purple-leafy on 10/22/24, 8:08 PM

  C!

  My job is typical web TypeScript + Python

  But in my spare time I’ve been deep diving C and loving it for the most part. Though I really hate strings in C!

• by wruza on 10/23/24, 1:43 AM

  It was Lua 5.1+5.2.

  Then came out decent js versions, decent typescript ecos and Lua moved on to 5.3+.

  Ended up using ts for everything. Feels absolutely down to earth, practical and useful, what I searched for all my life. All my non-bash home code is ts, except for ML chunks, where I have to suffer through the hideous abomination.

• by VirusNewbie on 10/25/24, 5:58 AM

  Scala, it's very elegant and functional style just ends up with less runtime bugs. You fight the compiler more, but that's more satisfying than having to RCA something eight weeks after it ships.

• by kazinator on 10/25/24, 12:15 AM

  One I made myself: https://nongnu.org/txr

• by tetek on 10/25/24, 9:35 AM

  Elixir

• by stray on 10/22/24, 7:20 PM

  Common Lisp.

• by fastresearch on 10/22/24, 9:08 PM

  Swift and SwiftUI is fun for my own projects. I use Python and C++ for work.

• by nextos on 10/22/24, 11:52 PM

  Mozart/Oz, see the CTM book.

  Dafny and F* are also evolving pretty nicely.

• by sandwichsphinx on 10/22/24, 7:11 PM

  I really like Lua, it's simple and easy to compile

• by bicepjai on 10/23/24, 10:28 PM

  Rust, I thrive on its complaints :)

• by jdougan on 10/23/24, 11:42 AM

  Smalltalk

• by metaketa on 10/22/24, 8:04 PM

  Crystal; compiled Ruby!

• by nwnwhwje on 10/23/24, 1:02 AM

  Python, funnily enough

• by horsellama on 10/23/24, 7:09 PM

  Julia

• by dtagames on 10/23/24, 1:16 AM

  Lua

• by constantinum on 10/25/24, 1:31 AM

  haskell

• by 8BitArmour on 10/24/24, 6:49 AM

  rust