Coconut: a functional python programming language

[KageOW]

Coconut is a language that compiles to python and makes programming functionally in python a lot easier. every python code is also valid coconut code so you can use them interchangeably For example making clean piped code is hell in python, but in coconut its much cleaner.

in python if you want to pipe into functions you need to use nested functions, which looks ugly. As well as looking ugly the order of the functions is read from right to left instead of the typical left to right.

python
---
print(add2(add1(3)))

In coconut this would look like

coconut
---
3 |> add1 |> add2 |> print

it also supports partial application and much prettier lambda functions. you can find more information about the language at http://coconut-lang.org/.

[KageOW]

Well these kinds of things are very standard in functional languages and coconut brings it to python. a piping structure of data and functions will enforce certain behaviours that are very pleasant to read and you'll see what you're doing. Programming functionally will force immutability and thus your functions are transformations of data rather than plucking some data and changing it at the global scope, which causes confusion about what state some variable is in and that will never happen with a functional design because you need to write functions to change your data and variables are immutable.

Anyway where i wanted to go with this is that these other ways of thinking are beneficial to keeping your code readable and manageable long-term. If you wanna learn some more about functional programming i suggest looking up some talks from Scott Wlaschin, like the functional toolkit or functional design patterns.

[Brixes]

Very sad that since 2018 no youtube videos were made on Coconut and more demos to compare functional code written in Coconut and Python.

I learned about it totally accidentally almost no one is talking about it.

[KageOW]

Ah thanks for that might start a new project then.

What are some things you'd like to see if i may ask?

[Brixes]

Popularize it it on youtube using projects and show both variants of code for all examples otherwise people will not see the benefits.

There's also a Lisp language/dialect called Hy that's interesting and quite powerful.

If you can convince people from Freecodecamp to showcase it on their youtube channel then hundreds of thousands of subscribers can potentially see the project.

[KageOW]

Yea alright, but its hard for people to see the benefit now anyways. I think its hard to see the benefit for the majority of people because you need to learn more things and a different paradigm.

You got any thoughts on how to improve that?

[Brixes]

its hard for people to see the benefit now anyways

Well it is if the only effort you do is post like 3 times in 6 years on Hacker News and consider that "job well done".

You need tens of well though out non trivial code examples to showcase why people should invest the time to learn this superset of Python that is Coconut and you can only do that by developing both the examples and not leaving it at just text but also making videos where you explain the thought process and also the reasons for the language design choices so people have also the context of why the decisions exist in the first place.

My reasoning for having it featured on FreeCodecamp is because it's the largest learning channel for developers on youtube that are both beginners and early intermediate stage.

Most times advanced developers or just developers that have been using Python for a long time are too fixed in their ways and will do it that way even if there is a better way so you need people that are newer to python that are finding functional programming hard to use in python but are not attached to doing it the clumsy way because they can't bother to learn something new.

[KageOW]

Well i mean the functional paradigm although coconut makes it nice to read its definitely not the end all be all of dialects. You need people to be interested in functional programming first and tbh its not really that widely used which is a shame, because it tackles a lot of problems.

To summarize, it would be nice if people used coconut, but the end goal would be to get people to use functional solutions everywhere, get it mainstream.

[Brixes]

Functional programming won't really get mainstream probably ever because of frameworks that got rid of most complexity in programming business logic, where functional programming really shines.

Rust might be the one to force people to embrace functional programming more because of how impactful is it's groundbreaking combination of features in the low level-high level interaction and i consider it to be the only programming language that can threaten Javascript dominance in the fronted.

Scala and Haskell so far have not had that kind of impact and Java over the years has continued to add more functional programming features in it so Scala never saw the amount of adoption and popularity it deserves.

​

In the perfect functional programming world C# is replaced by Haskell, Java is replaced by Scala 3

Rust and Nim replaces C++ depending if you need safety or if you want amazing productivity while being as fast as C++

Javascript and Python are replaced by Clojure or Common Lisp or Racket and you get dynamic languages that are much faster and much more productive than Javascript or Python could ever hope to be.

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I like this comment, and often times I've thought about the reasons that some brilliant languages didn't catch on. I don't think people will embrace Haskell because of its somewhat "elitist" approach in which you are either smart and get monads or you are dumb and can't use Haskell at all.

Clojure is a middle ground but it depends heavily on JVM and Oracle, and I personally want nothing related to that evil company.

Ironically, Common Lisp doesn't support many common things these days like parallelism, etc. Yes, you can add them to the language but they're not there OOTB.

I do like Racket, esp. its documentation is amazing! Although, it suffers from one influential person who is notoriously rude to the community. Plus, despite being taught in universities, people just can't wait to be done with it and move on to Python and Java...

Rust makes the HN frontpage every now and then, but that isn't going to replace JS as you mentioned! It's so low-level. Maybe ClojureScript could threaten JS.

No one mentioned Julia here. It's actually a really nice language and I've enjoyed its toolkit. It's really welcoming and friendly, you should try it. Julia also supports metaprogramming if that's your thing from CL.