Coding Cool with Fan!
The most exciting new programming language I have seen in quite some time is the new Fan language. I recommend reading Why Fan and taking the Tour to have get a quick grasp of what Fan offers. Then Download Fan and StartHere!
Why am I so enthusiastic about
Fan? It's Object Oriented, but also supports functions as
first class objects. That makes
Fan
one of the new "Object-Functional" languages (see
Scala
for another example, although I am finding
Scala
a bit overly-complex for my taste).
Fan
is easily approachable from a C/C++/C#,
Java,
Python,
Ruby
or
Smalltalk
background.
Fan interoperates on the Java VM, the .NET Framework's CLR, and also supports compiling JavaScript for use in browsers. Fan's design should make it portable to Parrot and other run-time targets in future.
More than anything else, though, I like Fan's clean, and I must say rather beautiful, design. Look at this quote about the development team's approach to the Fan API's: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - but we are obsessed with making the Fan APIs beautiful." Brian and Andy Frank, Fan's two main developers, are quick to state that Fan is a practical, rather than academic language. However, I assure you a *lot* of thought and deep knowledge about the evolution of programming languages has gone into Fan's design. I consider Fan quite elegant and am very much enjoying cooling my code with Fan!
To help spread the
Fan
meme, I have started
FanFans, a
LinkedIn
Group for those who want to "fan the
Fan!" If you're on
LinkedIn, search for "FanFans" or "Fan language" and join the
group!
So, let's all Fan out and spread some cool code!