AoC is often used to learn a new programming language, but it can also be used to improve them—especially less established ones. Theres a small community [0] o

AoC is often used to learn a new programming language, but it can also be used to improve them—especially less established ones. Theres a small community [0] of people who decided to try out Coalton [1], which is a Common Lisp DSL that has a strict, Haskell-like type system, and has strict evaluation (not lazy) semantics. Pattern matching, algebraic data types, all that jazz are supported directly in a Common Lisp environment. For example, here is a function to read in the first problem's data, which makes use of the usual high order functions (map and filter), as well as currying (only one argument provided to /=, making it curried): (declare read-aoc-data (Unit -> (List Integer))) (define (read-aoc-data _) "Read the data for problem 1." (let ((data (fromSome "Couldn't read AOC1 data." (read-file-into-string aoc1-input-file)))) (map parse-int-or-fail (filter (/= "") (split-string #\Newline data))))) Type annotations, as in any good ML, are optional (except when there are polymorphism bugs, like one found during AoC!). Unlike Haskell, purity isn't demanded. There's a small contest [2] with all sorts of prizes for doing AoC in Coalton and contributing back to the project through tutorials, PRs, and bug reports. [0] They hang out on Discord https://discord.gg/cPb6Bc4xAH https://discord.gg/cPb6Bc4xAH [1] https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton [2] https://coalton-lang.github.io/20211129-aoc-contest/ https://coalton-lang.github.io/20211129-aoc-contest/