Most interesting non-mainstream language? [closed]

Answer 1

Try colorForth.

Answer 2

Learning any language that requires you to rethink your programming habits is a must. A sure sign is the pace at which you skim through the documentation of a language's core (not library). Fast meaning fruitless here.

My short list would be, in my order of exposure and what were the concepts I learned from them:

• Assembly, C: great for learning pointers and their arithmetic.
• C++: same as C with an introduction to generics, as long as you can stand the incredibly verbose syntax.
• Ruby/Lua: scripting languages, dynamically typed, writing bindings for existing C libraries.
• Python/C#/Java: skipped, these languages look to me as a rehash of notions originating elsewhere with a huge standard library. Sure the whole packages are nice, but you won't learn new concepts here.
• OCaml: type infererence done right, partial application, compiler infered genericity, immutability as a default, how to handle nulls elegantly.
• Haskell: laziness by default, monads.

My €.02.

Answer 3

PROLOG is a rule-based language with back-track functionality. You can produce very human-readable (as in prosa) code.

Answer 4

I find Factor, Oz and OCaml quite interesting. In fact, I have started using Factor for personal projects.

Answer 5

I've recently looked up a lot about Windows PowerShell.

While not necessarily just a language. It's an awesome shell that has a built-in scripting language. It's basically a super-beefed up command line shell.

Unlike Unix shells, where everything is string text (which definitely has it's benefits), PowerShell commands (cmdlets) use objects. It's based on the .Net framework so you guys who are familiar with that will have probably already figured out that anything PowerShell returns can be piped and the properties and methods of that object can be used. It's fun to say "everything is an object!" again just like when OOP was getting big.

Very neat stuff. For the first time, Windows is implementing some of the Unix command-line interface tools similar to grep and the whole bunch.

Answer 6

If you're interested in VMs, you should look at Parrot...There's a bunch of languages supported and that's pretty neat....

O'caml is a good language if you want to learn how to implement a compiler...