Check out Nim.

    import rdstdin, strutils
    
    let
      time24 = readLineFromStdin("Enter a 24-hour time: ").split(':').map(parseInt)
      hours24 = time24[0]
      minutes24 = time24[1]
      flights: array[8, tuple[since: int,
                              depart: string,
                              arrive: string]] = [(480, "8:00 a.m.", "10:16 a.m."),
                                                  (583, "9:43 a.m.", "11:52 a.m."),
                                                  (679, "11:19 a.m.", "1:31 p.m."),
                                                  (767, "12:47 p.m.", "3:00 p.m."),
                                                  (840, "2:00 p.m.", "4:08 p.m."),
                                                  (945, "3:45 p.m.", "5:55 p.m."),
                                                  (1140, "7:00 p.m.", "9:20 p.m."),
                                                  (1305, "9:45 p.m.", "11:58 p.m.")]
    
    proc minutesSinceMidnight(hours: int = hours24, minutes: int = minutes24): int =
      hours * 60 + minutes
    
    proc cmpFlights(m = minutesSinceMidnight()): seq[int] =
      result = newSeq[int](flights.len)
      for i in 0 .. <flights.len:
        result[i] = abs(m - flights[i].since)
    
    proc getClosest(): int =
      for k,v in cmpFlights():
        if v == cmpFlights().min: return k
    
    echo "Closest departure time is ", flights[getClosest()].depart,
      ", arriving at ", flights[getClosest()].arrive

https://github.com/Araq/Nimrod/wiki/Nimrod-for-C-programmers

If I had to guess speed is pretty close to C, right.

Nim is pretty awesome and has been around for a while. I wish one of big entities out there Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple would have adopted Nim and ran with it instead of inventing their own langauges.

At the time when Go and Rust were conceived Nim would have certainly not been on their radar. Both were announced in 2009, at a time when the Nimrod repository had barely even got off the ground[0]. And Nim doesn't really address one of Apple's chief concerns: smoothly transitioning away from Objective-C.

[0]: https://github.com/Araq/Nimrod/graphs/contributors

Python 3 has function annotations and you can use it for static type checks. See this:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/08/python-type-annotation-pro...

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2014-August/0...

http://mypy-lang.org/

https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/controlflow.html#function...

Those are only checks, and don't make your code faster (in fact, slower, when checks are enabled). To get efficiency benefits you need a language/compiler designed around static typing. Cython offers a superset of Python that can be statically typed.

Last time I used Perl it went badly, but it was a typical hacked up mess.

For someone mainly in the Python/Java/C++ world is Moose something worth looking at as a mind expansion exercise? Your description makes it sound appealing.

And, dare I ask, what about Perl 6?

I want to write something concise and coherent, but it's not happening today :) Instead, assuming you've read the teasers in the Moose manual [1] I'd recommend this [2] interesting comparison of how horizontal code re-use can be achieved in Java, Ruby, PHP and Perl+Moose. There's more philosophical/winding essays on Moose from Chromatic, for example at [3].

Roles/traits/method modifiers/MOP/composability etc. are all great things for getting more reusability... however (and this might sound stupid) the thing that saddens me most when writing Python code is when I find myself adding a bunch of asserts or adding program logic "manually" in situations where I'd normally specify that sort of thing declaratively in a Moose class definition or by referring to a centrally managed Type or delegate stuff through attribute features.

On the other hand, I'm barely into year 2 of full-time Python dev, so perhaps I've yet to find the idiomatic way of doing Python things I used to take for granted in Moose.

Regarding Perl 6, I don't know much about it, except that the original authors of Moose had some inspiration from it.

Is picking up Perl+Moose mind-expanding? It was for me, but I feel that what Moose gave me in Perl was a bit of a band-aid over the fact that it's such a malleable open-ended dynamic language. So as a C++/Java programmer this aspect might not be so enlightening to you, except to see how Moose achieves it in a pretty painless way that I think is very nice and idiomatic for a dynamic language (with the caveats that brings). To put it another way: it gives Perl some of the great benefits of properly declaring things up-front, without the boilerplate/inflexibility pain that I perceive the Java ecosystem's bureaucracy to be (I haven't touched Java for 10 years, so take that with a grain of salt).

If you want to explore some Moose-ish kinds of things within Python, check out [4] (there's another Moose clone in Python that's similarly inactive, sadly) and [5] (Enthought's stuff is perhaps a bit too heavy and incomplete to be the "Moose of the python world", but it gives you a good idea of some of the nice patterns possible when you think outside of the core Python OO featureset).

[1] http://search.cpan.org/dist/Moose/lib/Moose/Manual.pod [2] http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/01/horizontal-reuse-an-alterna... [3] http://modernperlbooks.com/mt/2009/05/perl-roles-versus-inte... [4] https://github.com/frasertweedale/elk [5] http://code.enthought.com/projects/traits/

One of those times I wish I had more than one upvote - thanks!

I definitely have a preference for a more declarative approach, and not in the J2EE giant piles of XML way. Will give these a look for inspiration - thanks again!

> And, dare I ask, what about Perl 6?

As an ardent Perl lover, I asked this question myself. Shameless self-promotion yada yada :

http://simula67.wordpress.com/2014/03/20/perl-6-evaluation/

Well said :). I like Perl but when I write it I'm aiming above all for readability