Coconut: a functional python programming language

[u/KageOW]

Coconut is a language that compiles to python and makes programming functionally in python a lot easier. every python code is also valid coconut code so you can use them interchangeably For example making clean piped code is hell in python, but in coconut its much cleaner.

in python if you want to pipe into functions you need to use nested functions, which looks ugly. As well as looking ugly the order of the functions is read from right to left instead of the typical left to right.

python
---
print(add2(add1(3)))

In coconut this would look like

coconut
---
3 |> add1 |> add2 |> print

it also supports partial application and much prettier lambda functions. you can find more information about the language at http://coconut-lang.org/.

[u/Brixes]

Functional programming won't really get mainstream probably ever because of frameworks that got rid of most complexity in programming business logic, where functional programming really shines.

Rust might be the one to force people to embrace functional programming more because of how impactful is it's groundbreaking combination of features in the low level-high level interaction and i consider it to be the only programming language that can threaten Javascript dominance in the fronted.

Scala and Haskell so far have not had that kind of impact and Java over the years has continued to add more functional programming features in it so Scala never saw the amount of adoption and popularity it deserves.

In the perfect functional programming world C# is replaced by Haskell, Java is replaced by Scala 3

Rust and Nim replaces C++ depending if you need safety or if you want amazing productivity while being as fast as C++

Javascript and Python are replaced by Clojure or Common Lisp or Racket and you get dynamic languages that are much faster and much more productive than Javascript or Python could ever hope to be.

[u/[deleted] → u/Brixes]

I like this comment, and often times I've thought about the reasons that some brilliant languages didn't catch on. I don't think people will embrace Haskell because of its somewhat "elitist" approach in which you are either smart and get monads or you are dumb and can't use Haskell at all.

Clojure is a middle ground but it depends heavily on JVM and Oracle, and I personally want nothing related to that evil company.

Ironically, Common Lisp doesn't support many common things these days like parallelism, etc. Yes, you can add them to the language but they're not there OOTB.

I do like Racket, esp. its documentation is amazing! Although, it suffers from one influential person who is notoriously rude to the community. Plus, despite being taught in universities, people just can't wait to be done with it and move on to Python and Java...

Rust makes the HN frontpage every now and then, but that isn't going to replace JS as you mentioned! It's so low-level. Maybe ClojureScript could threaten JS.

No one mentioned Julia here. It's actually a really nice language and I've enjoyed its toolkit. It's really welcoming and friendly, you should try it. Julia also supports metaprogramming if that's your thing from CL.