[pjmlp]

Unfortunately there is this alternative universe where languages like Lisp, and Smalltalk would have taken over mainstream, and by association languages like Standard ML.

I still fondly remember my introduction to ML ecosystem via Caml Light, OCaml was still Objective Caml, and Haskell was still getting beyond Miranda.

Instead as you well put it we keep we talking about faster horses, with the leading horse being C, and how to replace it by another one.

Or at least that was the path, until vibe coding became a thing, hopefully the bubble will burst.

[hurril]

Right and C has a special place in my heart. I have never coded C in anger, but the weird thing about coding in Java is how low level all the implementations are. I've had this debate/ conversation with people over the years and I realize that if I am the only one at a certain position, then I am wrong and not everyone else.

But I claim that Rust is actually a high level language. Higher level than Java. My argument is that in Rust (, F# and Scala) you can encode in structure, what has to be operational code in Java.

So in the stronger languages you can reason about larger swaths about domain concepts easily, whereas in Java you have to trust the test panel on faith and wade through deep sections of "magic code" (compare with magic numbers. Why is there a 427/ these 7 lines of logic here? What does it do?)