Im so happy seeing this. We are approaching „great language” level and for me this is the first one.
I would be thankful for pointing at any other language that reliably and safely adds great features and is already convenient to use. I jumped from mastering Go to learning advanced C#, because Go stopped with adding great things :(
I don’t know if it satisfies “already convenient to use”, but IMO ocaml fits “adds great features reliably and safely”. They merged their multicore compiler ~4 years ago, which was a pretty huge change that added parallelism through domains. Notably, they had a working version ~10 years ago, but refused to merge it until they sorted out some performance issues that would have affected existing single-threaded code.
I only say it’s not “already convenient to use” because I heard tons of complaints about the dev environment - mostly that there’s no debugger, no official package manager, etc. But they are working on ‘dune’, and just like the language itself, I got the impression that the dune developers were being conscious to “add great features reliably and safely”. So overall I thought it was a great language/ecosystem, ymmv though.
IMO OCaml is mind-bending (e.g. go figure out the 'in' keyword, I still don't understand it), F# is much easier/simpler.
`let <var> = <expr> in <expr>` is an expression. Top-level bindings are just `let <var> = <expr>`. That’s pretty much all there is to it.
https://ideone.com/HpTrI4Ocaml is just an ML in the traditional sense. It keep scope without curlies. There is really not much else to it.
The 'in' keyword is purely syntax, like semicolons/newlines or braces in your language of choice.
Never used OCaml but it seems like a way to chain together expressions using the same variable name? Seems odd but I could see myself using it
If I understand correctly that you think Elixir is not yet "convenient to use", I suggest you still give it a shot if you haven't. I'm generally a huge hater of dynamically typed languages, and I still love using Elixir.
I am a fan of Go, and have been interested in c#; would be interested in hearing about your experience