Ask HN: Suggest me a new programming language with small user community to learn

7 points by grepgeek 6 years ago | 13 comments

I want to learn a very new programming language. It should not be too popular. It should not have a large user community. It should be relatively new compared to Go, JavaScript, etc.

My intention in learning behind a language like this is to see if I can contribute run-of-the-mill libraries to this language's ecosystem. If it is new and not so popular yet, there is a good chance its ecosystem would be lacking where I can contribute my time and effort to improve it.

amirouche 6 years ago |

Scheme is big and small at the same time. It is old, but the last report on the language was released a couple of years back and it is still growing. There is still many areas that needs some love.

Checkout http://scheme-lang.com/

elderK 6 years ago | |

You beat me to it!

I'd recommend checking out Chicken Scheme. Not only is it a kick-butt implementation but its community, #chicken on Freenode, is truly fantastic.

Give it a whirl :)

siriniok 6 years ago |

I'd try Racket (Scheme family) or ReasonML.

em-bee 6 years ago |

there are plenty of older but less popular languages that could use some help to improve the ecosystem.

pharo smalltalk for example. (i can give you a list of things i'd like to have there right now.)

pike is a nice language with a small community. plenty of room for interesting things to add.

red-lang is another one that could use some help.

bonus: if you pick that up any of these three i'll offer to mentor you :-)

shpx 6 years ago |

https://www.idris-lang.org the book is great.

https://urbit.org/docs/learn/hoon/ has a small, welcoming community. It's pretty out there though.

There's also nim (fast Python) and Crystal (fast Ruby).

throwaway8879 6 years ago | |

I've been meaning to check out urbit thoroughly for a while but they seem to have gone overboard with the esoteric terminology, at least for me personally. I was put off by the naming schemes in the docs last I looked at them about a year ago. I suppose I'll have another look again. Maybe they grow on you once you are familiar with them.

brianush1 6 years ago |

Odin[0] is very new and has a pretty small community, but it's promising and very well thought-out.

[0]: https://github.com/odin-lang/Odin

hazz99 6 years ago |

I'd recommend Dart. It's a great language but the ecosystem was severely lacking when I lasted used it.

An additional benefit is that it's super easy to contribute to the Flutter codebase!

codegladiator 6 years ago |

What do you consider as "run-of-the-mill" libraries ? like data-structures/algos ? or say something like a database connector / http router ?

dom96 6 years ago |

Nim sounds like a perfect opportunity for you :)

throwaway8879 6 years ago |

Zig is very cool. Not sure whether it has a community yet. I liked the authors talks and livestreams on YouTube.

_proofs 6 years ago |

Lua!

jazoom 6 years ago | |

Lua is 26 years old. The OP said younger than Go. Go is 9 years old.