HACKER Q&A
📣 _448

What are some less noisy programming languages?


I am a C++ developer. Looking at C++, it looks very "noisy" i.e. the syntax is really painful to the eyes e.g. take one of the class constructors of the 'any' library in Boost:

any(ValueType&& value , typename boost::disable_if >::type* = 0 // disable if value has type `any&` , typename boost::disable_if >::type* = 0)

This is really painful to read because of the syntax "noise".

What languages are less noisy?


  👤 nikonyrh Accepted Answer ✓
I am familiar with Python and Clojure, and have peeked at Haskell. Have a look at https://codegolf.stackexchange.com for just how succint you can get.

In general dynamically typed languages require less up-front definitions and determine how things go on the fly.

I have found that Clojure is great for data-mangling. This example groups words in a sentence based on the number of vowels in each:

(group-by #(count (filter (set "aeiouy") %)) (clojure.string/split "this is my example input string" #" "))

{1 ["this" "is" "my" "string"], 3 ["example"], 2 ["input"]}

Oh did I mention that in this language comma is threated as white space and can be ommitted? :D But you may have to use a few more brackets to group expressions appropriately.


👤 thesuperbigfrog

👤 elviejo
I agree, and I think less noisy languages are those in which white space is significant so: Haskell and python

👤 auslegung
Elm and Haskell are two I have experience in that are so much simpler, syntactically, than modern C-based languages. F# is very similar to Haskell syntactically. That makes me wonder if all (or most) ML-based languages are “quieter” than C-based languages.

👤 Bostonian
Python, and I would argue Visual Basic and modern Fortran.