14
votes
Any cool coding languages?
Hey I wanna know if you guys know about any cool coding languages that are not Janet, Squirrel, or fennel I know those. This is just to learn and too port to BoredOS
Hey I wanna know if you guys know about any cool coding languages that are not Janet, Squirrel, or fennel I know those. This is just to learn and too port to BoredOS
What kinds of languages are you interested in? What's your connection to BoredOS?
If you want to make your own language, I highly recommend reading Crafting Interpreters, which is a whole book on how to do it, first in Java and then in C. But you could use any language you want.
I think if I wrote another interpreter for fun, I'd try writing it in Lean 4, just to see learn more about what mathematicians are up to. (Lean is used for proofs but it's apparently a real programming language too?)
I mean my connection to BoredOS is im willing to become a main packager for the repos. The reason I care is I was the original package manager developer
If you're looking for a language that would be interesting to learn and easy to port, I've heard lots of good things about Forth. It's a very different paradigm from most programming languages (including the ones you mentioned), so it might be a good choice if you want to expand your mind. And it has a reputation of being relatively easy to port; it's easy enough that a traditional rite of passage in the Forth community is to write your own Forth interpreter from scratch.
(Disclaimer: I have not yet written my own Forth. Someday…)
I don't know what the best learning resource is, but I'm immensely fond of Dave Gauer's introduction to Forth. It's a ton of text, but his writing is engaging, and I love his whimsical illustrations. He does an amazing job of explaining why one should care about this little oddball language from the 70s.
I think Zig is cool. I'm using it for a UEFI module and toying with an emulator.
Depends on what you mean by cool but you might want to check out this earlier thread on the Meta programming language.
I agree with the suggestion of Forth and maybe after that Fortran!
and then maybe make something like this?
https://github.com/solod-dev/solod
Let me introduce you a very interesting programming paradigm called rewriting this is a talk from modal's author, it goes into detail before talking about rewriting, there are bunch of different languages like modal, nova, pyra in the rewriting paradigm.
They are really cool :D
I think you linked the wrong thing?
I got to a video called "Handmade Cities", which sounds cool too, but not what I expected considering your explanation.
My bad, I have corrected the link
I think I might try these they look cool, I might go with nova.
Gleam is a pretty nifty language, it's what made functional programming click for me since it has a pretty familiar syntax and doesn't get bogged down in the theory of it all. Compiler is written in Rust and the compiled code runs on Erlang's BEAM or JS.
I don't know if I would call it cool, but Tcl could be an interesting option. It was originally designed to be small enough to include as a scripting language in other programs in the late 80s/early 90s. It is extremely dynamic and technically the only data type it has are strings.
APL could be interesting as well, since it uses its own set of characters for everything. I've never used it myself, but it seems like something that may have caught on more in an alternate universe.
Another vote for tcl, its a really fascinating language with a really comprehensive standard library. You can make GUIs, web apps, CLI apps etc fairly easily
This article was going around recently and I feel like it highlights the strengths of the language quite well
https://cgicoffee.com/blog/2026/04/tcl-tk-develop-cross-platform-cli-gui-tools-tutorial-guide
Someone I know has been working on a scripting language called Nari, admittedly I haven't tried using it myself yet but it looks pretty cool (and they seem pretty passionate about this project)
Edit: also remembered about the MonkeyX language. This one I have used, it can transpile the code you write into different languages. Specifically I had an, uh, experience of reverse engineering monkey code that has been transpiled to c++ and then compiled with msvc. Fun times, but wouldn't want to do that again. Language seems fine though if you can get past some unusual syntax decisions