🤓 So you're using a weird language 🧠

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2022-10-06 00:00:25

Looking through Bozhidar Batsov notate his first impressions of OCaml and him previously asking its users about their workflows after finding its REPL/interactivity story more limited than Clojure, I realised I have some experience with the statement "I'm gonna write a program using a weird language," I thought I'd write a few narratives and strategies.

For context: programming languages was where I first went from computing being a thing you could do to something you could love. When I stretched my brain and rewrote a program from C++ into Scheme, I saw one class of bugs disappear and a different class of them manifest (to say nothing of performance changes, extensibility…). I also read Beating the Averages and thought I could find that Special Language that would make programming feel as natural as acting did (spoiler, it didn't, but it was about the journey, man).

Examples of this skill are me doing Advent of Code twice with a different language every day (2016, 2021), writing a web app in Erlang, a static site generator in OCaml (which powers this blog), a Scrabble solver in C, Erlang, and Ruby, a Markov Twitter bot server in Go, and frankly too many shell and toy repos that I didn't bother to push up or list here.