As a non-functional-programming, c-language-familiar person, the syntax look fabulous. It seems like the first functional language I've seen that makes simple things look simple and clear.

It's kind of a bummer that "skins/themes" never caught on for programming languages. You see it once in awhile, I think some compiler people at one of the FAANGs did an OCaml skin/theme/alternative syntax (reason? something). And there's stuff like Elixir that's kind of a new language but also an interface to an existing world (very cool, Valim is a brilliant guy).

But you could do it for almost anything. I would love the ability to hit a key chord in `emacs` and see things in an Algol-family presentation, or an ML family, or a Lisp.

Seems like the kind of thing that might catch on someday. Certainly the math notation in things like Haskell and TLA were a bit of a barrier to entry at one time. Very solvable problem if people care a lot.

I don't think alternative syntax is a good idea. Reason is actually a good example, it forked the ecosystem and then fizzled out.

Not sure if you have some idea on how, but it feels like an unsolved problem to me. E.g. It is easy to theme a data structure, but if the layout matters it can be very hard to theme while also allowing free form edits.

This is a huge thing already, though?

The JVM is a virtual machine for which Java/Kotlin/Scala/Groovy/Clojure/Flix and a dozen others are front end syntax for.

Same with the CLR and C#, F#, Visual Basic, and technically LLVM/GCC if you want to be pendantic.

It seems to have borrowed heavily from Rust, which got a lot of these details right.

Really? The mix of :/indentation-significant functions and braces for everything else seems extremely questionable.

There is no significant indentation. What leads you to be believe that?

The Python-esque looking function defs.

looks like def x = expression

no indentation involved. did not dig in though