keywords VS papers

> I'm not sure here how you differentiate minimalist from restrictive.

The flexibility of the language and its syntax. The more constructs are syntactic, the less minimalistic it is, and Go is a very syntactic language.

> I've always considered Go to be minimalist in terms of available tokens to the programmer: https://github.com/e3b0c442/keywords/blob/main/chart.png

No language on this chart has even a passing resemblance to minimalistic. I don't think anything does when it reaches double digit keywords.

For reference, I believe Smalltalk has 6.

And forth is more complicated because it doesn't really have keywords at all, and barely any syntax, instead it has assembly-coded / runtime-provided words (~functions) and variables. SectorForth (https://github.com/cesarblum/sectorforth/) is down to 8 builtin words, 2 IO words, and 5 variables (milliforth packs those behind a word instead). And so far 2 of the words have been found unnecessary / redundant.

> I like Rust's pragmatism.

Me too.

But Scala is also a very pragmatic language. If you want something academic go for Haskell.

> Allow limited operator overload.

Nitpick: Scala does not have any operators. So it doesn't have operator overloading at all.

Scala simulates operators by infix method syntax.

Instead of writing `1.+(2)` you can just write `1 + 2`. But the later is the same method call as the first one!

> Eschew HKT for a simpler abstractions.

AFAIK HKTs are more or less "just postponed" in Rust, AFAIK.

People would like to add them of course. The discussion goes on forever by now. Some small insight (there is much more when you look for it):

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/324

https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/higher-kinded-types-the-di...

> Don't go in the deep end with type power, nor too much in opposite direction and avoid any complicated feature.

While having a full ML style type system with afine types on top, and quite some other type level mechanics up to singleton types?

Sure sure, no power in here. :-)

> The more powerful feature the more abusable it is, and Scala loves the power at all cost.

Everything is "abusable". This is not an argument.

But that Scala loves power at all cost is simply not true. The contrary is.

Just to cite one of the most influential post in Scala land of all times:

https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/StrategicScalaStylePrincipleofL...

This, and the BDFL constantly complaining about unnecessary complex code people write speaks for itself.

Scala lately even reduced the power of some features just to prevent "abuse". (Which is partly an overreaction; but that's another story).

> Why would anyone care? The more flexible/powerful something is the harder it will be to parse by humans and tooling.

That's also not true.

Scala has a very small and simple syntax (despite all the language features).

Scala is on the surface much much simpler and much more regular then Rust!

https://github.com/e3b0c442/keywords

(You could also compare the language grammars. This would be even more in favor of Scala in this regard).

Scala 3 looks even almost like Python!

https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/book/scala-for-python-dev...

> Plus Scala has the big deal breaker. GC and no custom primitive types.

What a "deal breaker"?

https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/do...

You've seen this here in the thread?

Also:

https://docs.scala-lang.org/overviews/core/value-classes.htm...

As soon as Valhalla lands in JVM-land this will be full blown value types without any limitations.

And in Scala Native you can have of course native structs today. (Only that Scala Native isn't ready for prime time just now).

In the long run Scala Native could also run without GC. The Caprese project will bring something that is more powerful than Rust lifetimes. Lifetimes will fall out as a special case of a more general concept.

> > Besides that: The Rust people are looking envious. I've read about some ideas that were more or less a direct copy of Scala's implicits.

> What do you mean exactly?

Implicits get discussed every now and than in Rust land. Even the above Rust internals discussion start with them.

Or this here:

https://tmandry.gitlab.io/blog/posts/2021-12-21-context-capa...

Also I've once read something that looked like a brain storming for future Rust features. They came up with more or less implicits (only that they didn't call them like that, so I can't find this any more, didn't bookmark it).

Someone even once proposed directly Scala's implicits for Rust. But this went nowhere as the other people on the forum actually didn't understand them (which was no wonder as the example was quite terrible and the proponent was not really experienced with Scala so couldn't explain it well). People came than to quite wrong conclusions (some of them even mixed implicits in general even the dreaded implicit conversions, which were in fact mostly overused and caused trouble in Scala; but things got redesigned exactly because of that).

Check out: https://github.com/e3b0c442/keywords

In order to actually answer your question in some form: Here’s a list of programming languages ranked by number of keywords.. Looking at this list, consider that PHP used to be considered a beginner friendly language and that Java is often chosen as the first language for new CS students. Your question seems to be difficult to answer!

It is slowly making its way through the standards committee. https://github.com/cplusplus/papers/issues/43

The author has a fork of clang and gcc with some pretty impressive speedups, so I’m hopeful! https://lists.isocpp.org/sg14/2024/04/1127.php

What's fun is, because everything is decided in papers, we can find out why! https://github.com/cplusplus/papers/issues/884

Accepted paper here: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2022/p20...

> The proposed std::print function improves usability, avoids allocating a temporary std::string object and calling operator<< which performs formatted I/O on text that is already formatted. The number of function calls is reduced to one which, together with std::vformat-like type erasure, results in much smaller binary code (see § 13 Binary code).

Additionally,

> Another problem is formatting of Unicode text:

> std::cout << "Привет, κόσμος!";

> If the source and execution encoding is UTF-8 this will produce the expected output on most GNU/Linux and macOS systems. Unfortunately on Windows it is almost guaranteed to produce mojibake despite the fact that the system is fully capable of printing Unicode

See https://github.com/cplusplus/papers/issues/557

Bringing editions to C++ failed, and I am not aware of anyone trying to tackle the issues https://github.com/cplusplus/papers/issues/631

(I could be wrong though! I follow the committee more than you may guess, but not as much as to think I know everything about what's going on.)

GitHub would not be relevant in this respect because:

* It's owned by a (single) commercial corporation, Microsoft.

* There is censorship both by content and in some respects by country of origin.

* The code is closed.

but otherwise it's an interesting idea.

The C++ standardization committee uses GitHub to track papers submitted to them, see:

https://github.com/cplusplus/papers

There was no non-approval. The facility needs more work, and the authors (and the committee) were focusing on getting print/format done first. I hope that the paper will be worked on again in the future. We will be happy to review it once there is a revision (see github for history)

For more details on what we did at the 2023-06 Varna meeting, the [GitHub issue](https://github.com/cplusplus/papers/issues/328) associated with the paper has a summary.