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That's why I have no interest in Scala. I prefer languages with only a handful (or less) of "good stuff" that you can then build on top of.



The main thing Swift is lacking compared to Scala is support functional programming. I'm not sure that's the part which you want to back away from.

Apart from that, Scala is built on an impressively small amount of orthogonal concepts (at least compared to stuff like C#, F#, C++, OCaml, etc.) despite what all those "experts" on the Internet say. :-)


Swift feels right at home in the ML language family. Not sure what you mean by lacking functional programming support.


Type-classes, monadic syntax and higher-kinded types come to mind.


So OCaml, Scheme and Lisp aren't functional programming languages?


Maybe in the 80ies. I suppose with things like Agda, Idris & friends, one can say that the standards are rising.


Time to throw away SICP then?!?


I think SICP is still very important from an educational POV.

But I also think standards should reflect the progress made in the last few decades and shouldn't pretend that it's still 1960. Otherwise, things like Go happen.

So, yes, functional languages these days should probably require types (not specific to functional languages, just a general requirement to throw out all untyped languages without wasting time), typeclasses, and at least one of higher-kinded types, linear/dependent types, type families, or something like the fusion of type-level and value-level programming like in Idris.




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