Ask HN: What is a programming language that you don't use at work but enjoy?

At work, I use Go and Python, but a short while ago I started learning Clojure and fell in love with the simplicity and a totally different approach to everything.

What is your favourite second language and why?

ocean_moist · a year ago

BQN[1] (an APL variant). There is something really beautiful/elegant to me about composing higher order functions in a purely point free way. Array programming is a nice application of this, and this one has the best ergonomics.

[1] https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/

ironlake · a year ago

Forth. I learned it very late in my programming career which started with Java. It just feels like home in a way that no other language ever has.

Mostly useless tho

sk11001 · a year ago

Go is lovely - it’s super pragmatic and things just work.

jarl-ragnar · a year ago

Clojurescript. I used it to build an MVP proof of concept for work and now have to watch a small team re-write it using Typescript and Angular

They’re still not at feature parity with 2x the team, 2x the time and 3x the lines of code.

iLemming · 10 months ago

I love Clojure for data-related tasks, it's just better than anything else, even Python. And I love Clojure dialects for anything that talks to JS-engines - Clojurescript, nbb, squint - it's really nice to be able to use something like Puppeteer or Playwright and "interactively" click buttons, and navigate through pages in the REPL, it's like playing a video-game - super fun. And babashka is awesome for system scripting.

tnvmadhav · a year ago

I don't currently use Python at work. I freaking love it.

numerosix · a year ago

Ada, from 8bits microcontrollers to amd64 and arm too... really portable, so readable and robust, strong typed, and great community too.

purple-leafy · a year ago

My job is typical web TypeScript + Python

But in my spare time I’ve been deep diving C and loving it for the most part. Though I really hate strings in C!

wruza · a year ago

It was Lua 5.1+5.2.

Then came out decent js versions, decent typescript ecos and Lua moved on to 5.3+.

Ended up using ts for everything. Feels absolutely down to earth, practical and useful, what I searched for all my life. All my non-bash home code is ts, except for ML chunks, where I have to suffer through the hideous abomination.