Unfortunately, as with all standards, there's so many wonderful alternatives to choose from. I rather like Wisp: https://www.draketo.de/software/wisp

I wish all languages had the : operator that Wisp has. It's $ in Haskell. It simply says that what follows to the end of line is wrapped in brackets. So:

  putStrLn $ somefunc $ process val = putStrLn (somefunc (process val))

Like a UNIX pipe, but moving to the left.

Instead of $ they could have used ¢, since it looks more like an opening bracket.

There aren't too many keyboards with a ¢ key included, so I suppose that alone could be a show stopper.

They definitely didn't care about that. No language that uses ` , the most painful common character to write on most non-US keyboards put any consideration into that.

My UK keyboard has it

Not a fair comparison, since most keyboards DO have a US layout.

Outside of the US and a few other English-speaking countries? Not really. In Europe, US keyboards are nowhere to be found (the UK uses a different layout).

It's part of why it's always painful to buy a keyboard west of Oder for me, because Poland use ANSI layout as base, not ISO, at least as an option. After over a decade, even Microsoft finally learnt to default to "Polish (Programmers)" rather than "Polish (214)" keyboard when installing the OS (it was a common pitfall across whole Windows 9x).

Other languages in former Warsaw Pact tend to have "Programmers" layout available as well, because the national standard layouts tended to be designed for typewriters not programming and lack all kinds of characters people need - unless you go trigram route in C/C++.

For what its worth, Common Lisp at least does let you remap ` and such :)

I'm not talking about the physical ISO vs ANSI layouts. I mean the layout in software. It's not even close. Basically noone outside the US and Canada uses it. We're on HN, so obviously someone here will, but outside of this niche? Noone

We have reached Peak Bideshedding

I have always felt SML and F# are basically statically typed Lisps/Schemes without parentheses.