My idea of a good programming language is an ML-based language with type classes. OCaml without object orientation and with their type-generic modules replaced with type classes is pretty much what I want. No class inheritance, no exceptions, no reflection / runtime typing, etc.
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I certainly agree with the Go designers about a lot of what is bad and should be left out of the language. The problem is that what they have left is not a good language. I don't want a larger language, but definitely a far more expressive and substantially better designed one.
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Go interfaces are almost type classes. Drop reflection / dynamic casting / runtime typing. Add type parameters, and allow using interfaces as bounds on them for static dispatch via interfaces. Drop tons of hard-wired special cases due to that. Basically, apply some good taste...
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I like the general concept behind Go, just not what they actually created. If they had been deeply familiar with ML family languages, I think there's a very high chance they would have created a language that I'd think is great. It's so close in a sense, yet so far in practice.
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I followed development of Go from the announcement, and I'm very familiar. I made the mistake of choosing it for some projects and have written a fair bit in it. The language design cripples library design so much too, so despite a lot of great library design, they're not good.
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Drop multiple return values and have proper tuples. Replace UTF-8 by convention with real UTF-8. Make pointers non-nullable and replace null with sum types (compiler can still use null). Remove switches, and provide pattern matching instead. Remove lots of more hard-wired stuff.
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it sounds like you basically want to use Reason with Core (since Core makes a point of avoiding exceptions, and I don't think they use classes anywhere)
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(typeclasses, well, there's modular implicits, but I don't know when or if they'll be upstream. it's taking a while, but multicore is also taking a while in spite of being actively worked on, and that's just how OCaml is, I guess...)
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The issue is that I want a language with great libraries, tooling and a lot of backing behind it like Go, Rust and Kotlin. I usually want a high level language with garbage collection. Rust fits most of what I want for a low-level language, other than supporting unwinding at all.
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actually, what problem do you have with OCaml exceptions? they compile down to a longjmp, so have none of the issues with DWARF unwinding
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It's the invisible control flow that I dislike. Not a fan of call/cc, exceptions, etc. I do like more structured approaches like coroutines, generators, async/await, etc. I like the *idea* behind Go of a simple language easy to read and understand but I don't think it succeeds.
It seriously lacks important tools to make code composable and reusable. I find it painful to write application code in it, and far more painful to make libraries because I care a lot about making high quality library APIs. It's awful being forced into casting / reflection.
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Not a fan of how they did interfaces. I don't want the reflection / type assertions / casting at all. It's awful passing something as an interface to an API and not knowing it if only uses it via the interface, or figures out the type internally and maybe casts it. Not a fan.
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