Comment by andrewstuart 4 hours ago
We need Anders to make one final language.
A MINIMAL memory safe language. The less it has the better.
Rust without the crazy town complexity.
The distilled wisdom from C# and Delphi and TypeScript.
A programming language that has less instead of more.
>We need Anders to make one final language.
I do feel like there is a gap for a modern compiled, functional and garbage collected language.
Go isn't it because it lacks the functional constructs.
C# and Java aren't it because they depend on a VM.
Rust isn't it because of its difficult memory management.
Swift isn't it because it is so tied to Apple and their platforms.
What about Lua? The language is very minimal, memory safe, and has Pascal-like syntax just like Delphi.
Agreed, but the recently-released v5.5 fixes that [0], and it's fairly easy to fix this in older versions with the following snippet
setmetatable(_G, { __newindex = false, __index = false })
Or conversely, everything is an off-by-one error in every other language :)
(not OP) I would take out mostly historic stuff, that is in there for backwards compat, that has been superseeded. But this could be achieved using linters.
On the .Net VM you’re describing F#, mostly by virtue of being based on OCaml.
Contrasted with TypeScript and C#, F# is smaller, more expressive, stricter, with mature pattern matching and type resolution baked in from the ground up. F# was years ahead of the major languages on what are increasingly looking like ‘the basics’ around ADTs and immutability in modern distributed computing. OCaml and F# capture the linguistic high points of VB, Delphi, and C# with a broad spectrum of OOP(-lite) approaches, and have led those languages by decades on functional constructs that result in meaningfully tighter code. With the benefit of hindsight some approaches clearly map better to cloud computing and system verification.
F# also sits parallel to lots of living C#, objectively we see ‘less is more’. Less code per line, fewer lines per solution, terser and more LLM-efficient language. Error rates and refactoring costs are also meaningfully better IME, but harder to quantify in general terms.