What is the best alternative to Smalltalk?

Question

Ad

Help millions of people make better decisions.

Each month, over 1.7 million people use Slant to find the best products and share their knowledge. Pick the tags you’re passionate about to get a personalized feed and begin contributing your knowledge.

score 185 · Answer 1

Haxe

You should use externs when calling non Haxe code, but if you just need to call one or two external JS functions, you can skip type checking by calling untyped code. See More

Specs

Price:Free, Open Source

Site:https://haxe.org/

Current stable version:3.4.4

See All

185 50

score 75 · Answer 2

Julia

Julia code is easy to read and avoid a lot of unnecessary special symbols and fluff. It uses newline to end statements and "end" to end blocks so there is no need for lots of semicolons and curly braces. It is regular in that unless it is a variable assignment, function name always comes first. No need to be confused about whether something is a method on an object or a free function. Unlike Python and Ruby, since you can annotate the types a function operates on, you can overload function names, so that you can use the same function name for many data types. So you can keep simple descriptive function names and not have to invent artificial function names to separate them from the type they operate on. See More

Specs

Site:julialang.org

Current stable version:0.6

Type Model:Dynamically Typed

See All

75 33

score 201 · Answer 3

Haskell

All

24

Pros

Makes categorical higher order abstractions easy to use and natural to the language See More

Specs

Site:https://www.haskell.org/

See All

201 81

score 78 · Answer 4

Racket

Racket has an active community of users/developers that makes it easy to get help when needed. See More

Specs

Price:Free

OS:Linux, Windows, OSX

Site:racket-lang.org

Current stable version:6.11

See All Specs >

See All

78 23

score 760 · Answer 5

Python

All

35

Pros

Do something visually interesting in minutes by using the turtle standard library package. https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/turtle.html Turtle graphics is a popular way for introducing programming to kids. It was part of the original Logo programming language developed by Wally Feurzig and Seymour Papert in 1966. Imagine a robotic turtle starting at (0, 0) in the x-y plane. After an import turtle, give it the command turtle.forward(15), and it moves (on-screen!) 15 pixels in the direction it is facing, drawing a line as it moves. Give it the command turtle.right(25), and it rotates in-place 25 degrees clockwise. Turtle can draw intricate shapes using programs that repeat simple moves. Example Turtle Star Drawing from turtle import * color('red', 'yellow') begin_fill() while True: forward(200) left(170) if abs(pos()) < 1: break end_fill() done() See More

Top Pro

Has features of both high and low level language

It is somewhere between C and Java. See More

Top Pro

Static typing via mypy

Python's syntax supports optional type annotations for use with a third-party static type checker, which can catch a certain class of bugs at compile time. This also makes it easier for beginners to gradually transition to statically typed languages instead of wrestling with the compiler from the start. See More

Specs

Current stable version:3.7.0 and 2.7.15

GZipped size:22.5MB

Language type:Interpreted

See All

760 187

score 116 · Answer 6

Pascal / Object Pascal

Standard:ISO/IEC 7185:1990 Pascal and ISO/IEC 10206:1990 Extended Pascal

See All

116 38

score 198 · Answer 7

Elixir

Write code that writes code with Elixir macros. Macros make metaprogramming possible and define the language itself. See More

Specs

Price:Open source (Free)

Site:https://elixir-lang.org

Current stable version:1.6

GZipped size:3.61 MB (without required Erlang VM)

See All

198 63

score 88 · Answer 8

Nim

Nim has "asyncdispatch" module, which allows you to write async applications. See More

Specs

License:MIT

CPU:All CPU architectures that have an ANSI C compiler

OS:Windows, MacOS/iOS, Linux /Android/Termux, BSD, Solaris/SmartOS, HaikuOS, lots of others

Site:https://nim-lang.org

See All Specs >

See All

88 33

score 97 · Answer 9

F#

Site:http://www.fsharp.org

Current stable version:4.1

IDE Support:Visual Studio, Code, Rider

See All

97 39

score 232 · Answer 10

Golang

Current stable version:1.9.2

GZipped size:16MB

Author:Google and Ken Thompson

See All

232 84

score 63 · Answer 11

Common Lisp

Top Pro

Very Powerful REPL with SLIME

SLIME (Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs). See More

Top Pro

Carefully designed for interactive use

Almost all aspects of the language are designed with interactive/repl use in mind. See More

Top Pro

Condition/restart system

It is easy to recover from errors. Error resolution can be determined by the user at the REPL. See More

63 29

score 187 · Answer 12

Rust

Current stable version:1.26.0

See All

187 101

score 128 · Answer 13

C++

Specs

Price:Depends on Implementation

Standard: ISO/IEC 14882 or C++17

See All

128 88

score 27 · Answer 14

Assembly

Assembly language syntax is relatively uniform, and so there's less room for a student to get confused by obscure characters, or miss some meaning implied by structure, such as with scoping rules, or call-by-name/value/reference semantics. While there may be a lot of mnemonics to look up, most work involves only a very small subset of them. See More

See All

27 54

score 3 · Answer 15

Red

Red has very simple syntax that's easy to learn. It gets out of your way and lets you think about the problem instead, enhancing productivity. See More

3 9

score 158 · Answer 16

Kotlin

Kotlin has been designed and built by developers who have an industrial background and not an academic one. As such, it tries to solve issues mostly found in industrial settings. For example, the Kotlin type system helps developers avoid null pointer exceptions. Reasearch languages usually do not have null at all, but APIs and large codebases usually need null. See More

Specs

Price:Free, Open Source

Site:http://kotlinlang.org

Current stable version:1.2

See All

158 51

score 250 · Answer 17

Elm

Luckily you do not have to learn Haskell to be able to do any Elm. It is meant to be a language that compiles to Javascript, so for Javascript programmers (Front end) not for CS students who want to learn as many different algorithms as possible. See More

Specs

Price:Open Source

Site:http://elm-lang.org/

Current stable version:0.18

GZipped size:23.2 kB

See All

250 78

score 210 · Answer 18

Clojure

Current stable version:1.9

GZipped size:3.7Mb, requires JAVA

See All

210 69

score 43 · Answer 19

Ceylon

If you don't use platform-specific features, you can reuse the same code in your backend server (be it in Java or JavaScript) and in your client-side browser code, for example for storing data, validating input etc. See More

Specs

Price:Free, Open Source

Site:http://ceylon-lang.org

Current stable version:1.3.2

See All

43 19

score 230 · Answer 20

TypeScript

Specs

Price:Free, Open source

Site:http://www.typescriptlang.org/

Current stable version:2.3

See All

230 90