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Re:Flix – A powerful effect-oriented programming language by benreesman on Friday July 11, 2025 @01:35AM (#44528696)
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.

Re:Flix – A powerful effect-oriented programming language by dontlaugh on Friday July 11, 2025 @03:40AM (#44529359)
I don't think alternative syntax is a good idea. Reason is actually a good example, it forked the ecosystem and then fizzled out.
Re:Flix – A powerful effect-oriented programming language by pastage on Friday July 11, 2025 @06:08AM (#44530405)
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.
Re:Flix – A powerful effect-oriented programming language by gavinray on Friday July 11, 2025 @06:21AM (#44530485)
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.