I want to see absolutely no sensible and practical advice here. What programming language should I start vaguely and in a chill way teaching myself if I just want to experience something fun or elegant or interesting in and of itself, assuming I have no goal for using it to do anything really (outside of learning)
@grimalkina Since I see Piet and APL have already made the list, let me throw in a suggestion for jq (https://jqlang.github.io/jq/) - but specifically, doing something complex in jq. Like, I've been writing little jq one-liners for ages, but it was only when I wrote a full 100-ish line program in jq that I started to appreciate its stream processing model as being something distinctly different from the typical paradigms (functional, procedural, OOP, async, all that jazz).
@dave_andersen@grimalkina Incidentally, I find ML just basically the most elegant language I've ever used*. Also if the goal is to learn, many modern languages (Rust, Swift) are ML descendants, and Haskell is basically ML But It Goes Twice As Far, so learning an ML puts you in a good place.
Specifically SML/NJ is my favorite; OCaml has some slightly kludgier elements but also is nearly the same language and OCaml is better supported these days and has "Merlin", so OCaml is better to learn.
@dave_andersen@grimalkina (A decade ago I actually made a programming language that was supposed to be a halfway point of ML and Lua… it turned out strange but really interesting. I named it "Emily" cuz get it, it's "ML-y". You can write useful software in it but since it has zero libraries it pretty much exists only as this conference talk, no idea if you'll get anything out of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMZsc3cvwKs )
@grimalkina perhaps not quite what you're after, but would learning how to make https://art.djnavarro.net/gallery/ (all of which @djnavarro has created in R) be of interest? I think it is "fun and elegant and interesting in and of itself" (just like its creator).
@grimalkina Rust! OMG Rust. I mean, I don't know what language(s) you're into already. But I think Rust is maybe the most interesting language I've come across in years. So many languages are kinda the same. Rust... isn't? But in a really cool and thoughtful way?
And it's fucking fast, and portable, and you can target webassembly with it, and it's fast, and it's fast. Memory management without the overhead of a garbage collector. I'm still a n00b but I love reading about how the high-level features of the language work. Like, there's the borrow checker which enforces ownership, and that works by tracking the lifetime of things. But the crazy part is you can explicitly talk about object lifetimes IN THE CODE as a language feature.
It's mindbendy and awesome. I haven't had this much fun learning something so useful in years
@idan@grimalkina agree! I’ve been “learning” it for several years now and still feel like a beginner in many ways. Where something like Python I felt productive in a week.
@grimalkina "assuming I have no goal for using it to do anything really (outside of learning)" - I'd say go for art-making pretty patterns is a blast, and focussing on the problem solving is fun, rather than the spelling and grammar - hence Scratch, Snap!, Turtlestitch and TurtleArt all deserve your attention as jigsaw languages https://blog.richardmillwood.net/2014/07/26/jigsaw-programming/.
Squeak Smalltalk. It will give you a window into an alternate reality where the concept of “programming language” has fundamentally different semantic boundaries than it does in our reality.
AppleScript. Really I want to say HyperTalk here but unfortunately all the classic mac retrocomputing quality of life problems of HyperCard distract from the aesthetic of a programming language that takes parts of speech seriously.
@grimalkina I’d suggest checking out https://glitch.com (you can actually use a few different languages there) which helps avoid all the complexity of setting up your own servers if you want to build and explore stuff. And they have a vibrant community building lots of stuff with a fairly robust free plan (and they are owned by Fastly and are here on the Fediverse - they even have sample fediverse apps)
(Forth is also a cool language - decades ago I helped run a MuCK written in custom 4th)
@grimalkina Last thing: The Strange Loop Conference covers all kinds of next-generation, experimental programming languages. It's cool. You could do worse than to look through the previous year's sessions and just find one that tickles your fancy.
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