Ask HN: What is a programming language that you don't use at work but enjoy?
At work, I use Go and Python, but a short while ago I started learning Clojure and fell in love with the simplicity and a totally different approach to everything.
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.
I love Clojure for data-related tasks, it's just better than anything else, even Python. And I love Clojure dialects for anything that talks to JS-engines - Clojurescript, nbb, squint - it's really nice to be able to use something like Puppeteer or Playwright and "interactively" click buttons, and navigate through pages in the REPL, it's like playing a video-game - super fun. And babashka is awesome for system scripting.
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.
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.
I use Lua for small scripts on my small server at home. I use it inside OpenResty, one file per URL, sometimes calling local programs and always printing HTML for the browser. It's small and it works.
Fennel is great for someone who values homoiconicity and structural editing. It's a great joy to be able to reduce big chunk of Lua boilerplate into a three-liner macro in Fennel.
[1] https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/
Mostly useless tho
They’re still not at feature parity with 2x the team, 2x the time and 3x the lines of code.
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!
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.
Dafny and F* are also evolving pretty nicely.