@eris Do any specific languages come to mind as good examples? (Clojure and Go, to me, fit this bill in some ways.)

@EvanHahn for me it's more esoteric - K fits this bill very well, in my opinion. there's not a whole lot to K itself

id also say stuff like forth, which is very simple and there's very little.. language

@EvanHahn compared to other languages, you don't keep on learning the language or the gnarly bits. you learn how to do stuff better, but not more of it

@eris
Scheme fits this very well IMO. There's like 50 pages in the formal spec (for R5RS at least); you understand the language (which is literally one of the simplest syntaxes of all time) and you understand the relatively small number of library functions and that's it. All you have left to do is get better at composing the various functions to do what you want. It's not quite small enough to have literally every standard function memorized but it's pretty close.

@EvanHahn

@eris
Alternately—and you're gonna think I'm crazy—C feels like this. The language itself is pretty small and other than edge cases you use a small number of constructs and idioms to get things done. All you really need to keep handy is your POSIX headers reference and you're pretty much all good to chug through writing stuff (at least in my experience).

At least in contrast to C++ it's very easy to feel like you know almost all of C even if you're not experienced in it

@EvanHahn

@nytpu @EvanHahn but C has so many gnarly bits!

@nytpu @EvanHahn there is so much of C that can bite you in the ass that you have to keep track of, and there's so much to the language itself because of the massive legacy it has

@eris
The gnarly bits are what makes it fun! You never know when everything is gonna explode!

But yeah you usually spend more time learning the footguns in C then learning C itself. Sticking with C99/C11 and POSIX and outright ignoring the legacy stuff I actually find it pretty enjoyable to write though.

@EvanHahn