mwindow

I agree. The only advantage I can think of is smaller hello world programs. And that seems to be important from a marketing perspective: people new to the language won't perceive it as a verbose language.

I don't understand why the parent post of yours is getting this much downvotes. What's wrong with using a GC'ed language when performance requirements are permissive?

I disagree. Rust still requires thinking about low-level details like lifetimes, aliasing, whether/when to use `Box` or `Rc` etc., Even when these are not explicitly spelled-out sometimes (like in lifetime elision), the programmer still has to be aware of these. Plus, modern C++ also abstracts away raw pointers by your definition, and has `unique_ptr` and `shared_ptr` which are the same as `Box` and `Rc` respectively. Bare pointers are frowned upon in modern C++ too. Furthermore, the OP talks about languages high-level enough to be used by biologists, while maintaining an acceptable performance.

Have you heard of the Nu game engine[1]? It is a FRP-based game engine for F#.

[1] https://github.com/bryanedds/Nu

Not sure what the article indents to show, those "surprises" are the expected behaviour of `append` on slices.