About 2 months ago I would have said the same as the author, but I kept running against the hard edges of Rust: the borrow checker. I realised that while I really liked using algebraic data types (e.g. Enums) and pattern matching, the borrow checker and the low level memory concerns meant I spent a lot of time fighting the borrow checker instead of fighting the PL issues at the heart of my project. So while tokenising/parsing was nice, interpreting and typechecking became the bane of my existence
With that realisation I started looking for another more suitable language - I knew the FP aspects of Rust are what I was looking for so at first I considered something like F# but I didn't like that it's tied to microsoft/.NET. Looking a bit further I could have gone with something like Zig/C but then I lose the FP niceness I'm looking for. I also spent a fair amount of time looking at Go, but eventually decided that 1. I wanted a fair amount of syntax sugar, and 2. golang is a server side language, a lot of its features and library are geared towards this use case.
Finally I found OCaml, what really convinced me was seeing the syntax was like a friendly version of Haskell, or like Rust without lifetimes. In fact the first Rust compiler was written in OCaml, and OCaml is well known in the programming language space. I'm still learning OCaml so I'm not sure I can give a fair review yet, but so far it's exactly what I was looking for.
With that realisation I started looking for another more suitable language - I knew the FP aspects of Rust are what I was looking for so at first I considered something like F# but I didn't like that it's tied to microsoft/.NET. Looking a bit further I could have gone with something like Zig/C but then I lose the FP niceness I'm looking for. I also spent a fair amount of time looking at Go, but eventually decided that 1. I wanted a fair amount of syntax sugar, and 2. golang is a server side language, a lot of its features and library are geared towards this use case.
Finally I found OCaml, what really convinced me was seeing the syntax was like a friendly version of Haskell, or like Rust without lifetimes. In fact the first Rust compiler was written in OCaml, and OCaml is well known in the programming language space. I'm still learning OCaml so I'm not sure I can give a fair review yet, but so far it's exactly what I was looking for.