Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jestar_jokin 1559 days ago
As you say, it's just a matter of familiarity. Sounds like you just need exposure to more programming languages/paradigms, as it's a pretty common convention. I believe it comes from the ML family. OCaml[0] springs to mind. As others have mentioned, Rust[1], Kotlin[2], Haxe[3], Nim[4], Swift[5], Elm[6], Dhall[7], and Scala[8] all use this convention.

The current syntax seems better for type inference and gradual typing.

[0] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/ocaml/

[1] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/rust/

[2] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/kotlin/

[3] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/haxe/

[4] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/nim/

[5] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/swift/

[6] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/elm/

[7] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/dhall/

[8] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/scala/