Nemerle VS Pipefish

Nemerle, Wyvern, Kernel

Charm is a language where Functional-Core/Imperative-Shell is the language paradigm and not just something you can choose to do in Python or Ruby or PHP or JS or your favorite lightweight dynamic language. Because of the sort of use-cases that this implies, it didn't seem suitable to write another Lisp or another ML, so I got to do some completely blank-slate design. This gives us Charm, a functional language which has no pattern-matching, no currying, no monads, no macros, no homoiconicity, nor a mathematically interesting type system — but which does have purity, referential transparency, immutability, multiple dispatch, a touch of lazy evaluation, REPL-oriented development, hotcoding, microservices … and SQL interop because everyone's going to want that.

I think it's fair to call this a language announcement because although I've been posting here about this project for a loooong time, I've finally gotten to what I'm going to call a "working prototype" as defined here. Charm has a complete core language, it has libraries and tooling, it has some new and awesome features of its own. So … welcome to Charm 0.4! Installation instructions are here. It has a language tutorial/manual/wiki, besides lots of other documentation; people who just want to dive straight in could look at the tutorial Writing an Adventure Game in Charm.

In my own language there is some syntactic flexibility but the only thing that describe pretty table could mean would be the second of the possibilities above; the first would be expressed by describe prettyTable and the third by describe PRETTY, table. This makes it more readable from the point of view of a coder, and who else is going to want to read it, my mom?

I've been trying to think of a way of doing this which is simple and consistent and which can be extended by other people, so if someone wanted to embed e.g. Prolog in Charm they could do it without any help from me.

Charm does this for declaration of local constants in functions (there are no local variables in functions). So for example if you wanted to write the Collatz function this way (which you wouldn't, it's just a minimal example) then you could do so without worrying about a computational explosion:

I guess it's time for me to put aside my exploration of Charm and set up a collaboration with my son the lyricist.

In fact that's how a lot of Charm programs end up getting written, because you want to pass a whole bundle of stuff to the functions. For example.

No, it's "shell" as in "shell of the code". The idea is that the imperative bits of the language, the bits that do the mutation of state and the IO, can can call lovely pure referentially transparent functions. But functions can't call commands (otherwise by definition they wouldn't be pure). So all your imperative-ness is reduced to about 1% of your code which lives right at the top of your call stack --- the "imperative shell" of your code. See [here](https://github.com/tim-hardcastle/Charm/blob/main/examples/adv.ch) for an example. The "imperative shell" is the main function --- all 13 lines of it --- and everything everywhere else is pure and immutable.

I'm not sure what counts as cool. It's just dogfooding at the moment. I did a bunch of other languages (only the BASIC and the Forth are up to date with the current version of the language I think), and I did a tiny adventure game (and used it as the basis for a tutorial).