Larder

What's in your Larder #3: Little-known languages

Larder is our bookmarking service that syncs GitHub starred repos as bookmarks, so you can keep all your code-related resources in one place. This is week three of our regular bookmark round-up.

This week I'm looking at new or otherwise little-known programming languages. Here are some personal picks that made it into my larder.

Elm

The best of functional programming in your browser.

Elm is a Haskell-like language for writing reactive client-side code. It's pretty early, but the community is very active, and I think it's going to give the JS+React stack a real run for its money. (Bonus: its compiler error messages are incredibly friendly and useful.)

Pony

Pony is a strongly typed, compiled language. It's actor-based, like Erlang or Elixir, meaning concurrency is achieved with many small actors running independently. If you like Erlang's concurrency model but are looking for something strongly typed and object-oriented, Pony might be for you.

brownplt/pyret-lang

Pyret is a functional language with Python-inspired syntax, written in Javascript. I wish there was more you could do with it than just tinker in the browser, as the syntax is quite friendly.

crystal-lang/crystal

We love Ruby's efficiency for writing code. We love C's efficiency for running code. We want the best of both worlds. We want the compiler to understand what we mean without having to specify types everywhere. We want full OOP. Oh, and we don't want to write C code to make the code run faster.

Crystal is a typed, compiled Ruby-alike that's still young, but promises a nice compromise between high-level code and low-level performance.

felix-lang/felix

Felix is an advanced high performance statically typed scripting language.

Felix generates C++ binaries and has an interesting mix of functional and imperative style support, which leaves it looking like a strange mix of C and OCaml.