4 ms·

Serious question, what alternative(s) to Python would you recommend with nicer syntax?

• wffurr 5y ago
  Scheme or Go.
• Hizonner 5y ago
  Well, to be fair, sometimes, especially for short scripts, you're stuck with Python because you know it's going to be available. Personally, from a syntax point of view, as opposed to an easy availability point of view, I prefer Haskell, or Lisp if you can live with the parentheses. Haskell has some syntactic oddities, and the support for infix operators has encouraged the ecosystem to define way too many obscure </?$+/>-looking things, but the syntax mostly just gets out of your way and is relatively regular. I do admit that if you're going to be infixy anyway, a C-like "?:" ternary is nice. C got its expressions right. It is, of course, objectively true that one of the things Python does get right about syntax is the significant whitespace, and Haskell has that too (without the stupid colons). Curly braces are the work of the Devil, and "BEGIN" and "END" are just unmentionable.
  • marcosdumay 5y ago
    I don't think Python gets semantic whitespace right. It requires extraneous parenthesis and has an impact on lambda functions, making them way less powerful than they should be. Haskell got it right.
• rubyist5eva 5y ago
  Ruby for me. I program in both, primarily Ruby with a few python microservices and Ruby’s syntax is similar to Python in a lot of cases but much easier and nicer to break out for something “nicer” to look at. All in my opinion of course.
• dunefox 5y ago
  Honestly, I've been positively surprised by F#. Nice syntax, functional-first, pragmatic design.
• nicoburns 5y ago
  For web stuff: JavaScript For data science stuff: Julia