DEV Community

Discussion on: Which mainstream programming language has the ugliest syntax?

Collapse
 
eljayadobe profile image
Eljay-Adobe

I think plain OCaml and Haskell are probably about tied for popularity.

If you include F# as a kind of OCaml (since it is pretty much OCaml for .NET, as a first-class supported citizen by Microsoft), then OCaml wins the popularity contest in a landslide.

If you are deciding between Haskell versus Scala or Clojure ... well, I think either Scala or Clojure have Haskell beat.

Haskell is a pure FP.

Clojure is Lisp with FP added. (Normally targeting JVM, but can target .NET or transpile to JavaScript. Probably a bother to target .NET or JS.)

Scala is OO, with FP; targeting JVM. (In contrast to F# which is FP, with OO added in order to support .NET requirements.)

Thread Thread
 
mudia profile image
mudia

I find it fascinating that you think that Haskell uglier than OCaml! As a new hobby/amateur programmer, I find that your description of the two languages is the exact opposite. I know nothing of OCaml but just looking at comparisons of code and it seems that both languages are similar but Haskell is cleaner and has some nicer syntax options, especially when it comes to function composition.