> Egison is a programming language that realizes non-linear pattern-matching against non-free data types.<p>It's a what? Can someone ELI5 this for a lowly Python and JS dev - why would I want this?<p>----<p>I watched a talk about Scala's future [0] recently, in which the presenter compared the taglines of a few different languages (Go, Rust, Erlang, Scala), and how they relate to business pains or non-academic problems.<p>His conclusion about Scala's tagline - "Scala combines object-oriented and functional programming in one concise, high-level language" is that "no engineering manager in the history of software development ever thought to themselves 'hmmm, if only I had a language that fused OO and FP, I'd be able to solve my business problems'. That hasn't happened; that will never happen. This is an academic novelty that has zero relevance to any of us as professional software developers [...] this is not a business pain, this is an academic interest."<p>I felt a little bit like that when I read Egison's tagline: why should I care about this language?<p>[0] "The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War"
<a href="https://youtu.be/v8IQ-X2HkGE?t=15m8s" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/v8IQ-X2HkGE?t=15m8s</a>
I’ve been casually following Egison for a while now. Its customizable pattern matching is really cool. Unfortunately I do think the lisp syntax does turn some folks off; whether this set of folks overlaps with those who would be interested in Egison otherwise, is another question.<p>I’ve also noticed that it “pivoted” to focus more on math; is that intentional?<p>Anyway, good to see it on HN again. Anything that pushes more pattern matching research is a plus for me =). Mainstream languages barely started to adopt first-order pattern matching!
This looks like an intruiging alternative to Julia. Last time I tried Julia, effecient multidimensional code generation was incomplete due to required work in the type system. I wonder how Egison's performance matches it's expressiveness.
I love how it matches so much more. It would take me some time wrap my head around the new possibilities.<p>I doubt I have time to learn this or use it but it would be cool to see a list of examples of things that are much more concise and elegant in this language so that it expands my thinking. Is there a list of examples with comparisons to traditional languages?
Your syntax is bad and you should feel bad.<p>Mandatory XKCD: <a href="https://xkcd.com/297/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/297/</a>
Is there a academic language which focuses solely on performance and optimization- by building the program and data structures around the hot-loop and optimal cache usage?
Something Mike Acton would create if he wrote compilers?