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by ossopite 440 days ago
I think you really are describing ocaml, which is a great language, although its ecosystem isn't the best. It probably inspired most of the features you mentioned in rust. It also supports OOP (hence the O) but it's easy to avoid.

That said, I wouldn't compare it to scripting languages. The lack of implicit conversions / traits / ad-hoc polymorphism means it's not that convenient for scripting.
5 comments
raphinou 440 days ago
Fsharp, which originally was ocaml on dotnet, can also be run as scripts. It is a really practical way to start a project. I blogged about it here: https://asfaload.com/blog/fsharp-fsx-starting-point/
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int_19h 439 days ago
F# was never really "OCaml on .NET", though, not really. ML on .NET, sure, but it is (and always has been) missing OCaml's most interesting features, such as functors and OO with inferred row-types.
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raphinou 439 days ago
It probably was too much of a shortcut, thanks for the correction.
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int_19h 438 days ago
They have kinda positioned themselves that way and had (have?) syntactic compatibility with a subset of OCaml. And OCaml is probably the least obscure of the ML language family, so it's not exactly surprising.
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soulbadguy 439 days ago
Fsharp is such a nice languange. Such a shame that I never seem to get the light it deserves. Between the alternative light syntax, type providers and first class "scripting" mode supported it really was a great middle point between fully scripting language and fast prototyping and full blow projects
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jeltz 440 days ago
Ruby does very little implicit type conversion and is great for scripting. I think implicit type conversion is not required or even a good thing for scripting languages.
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threatofrain 440 days ago
Implicit conversion is not obviously that convenient for scripting. The JS community has largely moved to anti-recommend implicit conversion, such as by basically striking `==` from their vocabulary.
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xigoi 439 days ago
What makes OCaml inconvenient for scripting is how difficult it is to run code that uses some external libraries. You basically need to create a whole project structure with several config files, which creates a lot of friction compared to `import numpy as np`.
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nerdponx 440 days ago
Nim was great along these lines when I tried it. But that was before the v2.0 which apparently was accompanied by drama and a fork.
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rattray 440 days ago
What happened?
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archargelod 439 days ago
If I remember correctly, main reason for forking was that Nim BDFL was writing lazy commit messages and old codebase was hard to navigate around. Some small part of community forked the language and trying to rewrite the compiler. According to readme they're not trying to replace Nim, but to create new language with Nim as base. Not sure how usable it's right now or will it ever be.

I also want to point out that Araq quickly took the criticism and his commits look a lot better now.

Also, core Nim team is currently working on their own rewrite of Nim compiler, called Nimony, that should evolve into Nim 3.

Refs:

fork - https://github.com/nim-works/nimskull

commit 'drama' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32021299#32023998

nimony - https://github.com/nim-lang/nimony

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