Tcl, Red, Nim, Spry, Wren and Gravity

On random walks around the internet, I'm always looking for a language that can provide me the easiness of use of shell languages (and pipes, don't forget pipes), but with more flexibility. I'm still using zsh (and trying to sneak picolisp and factor), but here are the new contenders/discoveries.

I found Red, which looked super interesting. Very smalltalkish, and with very good support for windows GUI programming and interacting with the outside world. I haven't done anything beyond the classical "hello worlds", "factorials", "guess number"... It looks very cool though. It probably has 0 libraries, but well, you can't have it all.  Refinements look very cool. no idea how they are implemented, but it's a really nice idea.

Tcl, which you usually read that is something like a 'bad joke', because everything is a string.  But since I read that antirez's article I think it has something to it.

Nim, is probably the language with more share of all the ones listed here. It's nice and cute, and compiles to native, or js (multiple backends always look cool). Although I'm learning C myself because it's one of the fundamental languages one has to know, nim looks like a useful alternative for more practical purposes. It supports lots of modern idoms (map, filter,.. reduce...) and practices (channels, etc..). And also has support for macros (shown in the link to convert a bf interpreter to a compiler).

Spry, is a language created by Goran Krampe, that smalltalk wizard. It's implemented in Nim, and has ideas from Lisp, Rebol, Forth and Smalltalk. It looks very nice, but it's just a toy for now.

Wren and gravity, both small, with ideas from Lua/smalltalk/erlang.

And in wren performance page, there's this paragraph:

"Tested against Lua 5.2.3, LuaJIT 2.0.2, Python 2.7.5, Python 3.3.4, ruby 2.0.0p247. LuaJIT is run with the JIT disabled (i.e. in bytecode interpreter mode) since I want to support platforms where JIT-compilation is disallowed. LuaJIT with the JIT enabled is much faster than all of the other languages benchmarked, including Wren, because Mike Pall is a robot from the future."


Mike Pall is a robot from the future.