aria

This has been a pretty frequent source of feedback, and while I had ideas on that in my head, clearly I did not communicate them well enough I updated the website & README with more of a rationale/viewpoint of why Aria exists. Please take another look: https://github.com/egranata/aria/blob/master/README.md

I just noticed this comment a few days late, so sorry for the delay in answering Goals are documented in a roadmap doc: https://egranata.github.io/aria/ROADMAP.html as well as issues on GitHub, and ideas are always very welcome, so please bring yours! I'd love to chat I am not (yet) focused on performance, it's still at a point where the language and the library are changing. It runs decently well (as mentioned it's a stack based VM) such that you could actually use it to write some real programs. Good enough for a 0.9 I think Technical choices, I have a few big ideas that stand behind the overall design: - easy to pick up, flexible, run with, write code, "pleasing to the eye" is what you called, that's #1; - a simple module system that works with you (with more improvements in the roadmap); - easier to reason about errors (lots of things

The current implementation looks like a compiler to a stack-based bytecode with a straightforward textbook interpreter. For example, here is the interpretation of the Add bytecode: https://github.com/egranata/aria/blob/master/vm-lib/src/vm.r... So to a very rough first approximation, performance characteristics should be in CPython's ballpark.

I hadn't really looked at Nushell, but it (process control) is definitely something I plan to improve in Aria (https://github.com/egranata/aria/issues/21). Right now I have a simple system() wrapper, but not much in terms of advanced subprocess control. Maybe worth investing some time in cleaning up? I have tried to fill the niche of "scratch my itches, please", which means Aria is intended to feel smooth, pleasant and simple to write in. There are still things I want to improve before calling it a 1.0, but the general theme is, a general purpose scripting language with just enough structure and as little ceremony as possible. It may be that I struck the wrong balance somewhere (and I know of a few places, e.g. operator overloading - I plan to rewire the syntax), and that would be great to get eyes on and get feedback!

Aria is a modern, dynamic scripting language. It is meant to be a "sweet spot" language, easy to pick-up and enjoyable to use. It comes with a familiar C-style syntax, and draws inspiration from a variety of languages. It has a small but usable standard library and strives to be a low-ceremony-get-stuff-done kind of language. It is currently at version 0.9 and I would love feedback as I work towards getting it to 1.0.