What is your opinion on the Falcon language?

Question

Falcon is a programming language that supports multiple paradigms like message passing, OO, functional, and yet the code looks nice and clean.

What do you think, does it have a chance to take off and be used as a general purpose programming glue language? Is it worth exploring? What are your impressions so far if you used it in real projects?

Answer 1

While it looks interesting, and has some cool ideas, I don't see much use in learning it unless it's used in industry and or academia.

The history of programming languages is littered with great languages that have fallen to the way side because no one adopted them.

Their features are however often incorporated into more popular languages.

That said Ruby was created in 1993 and rarely heard of it till it got used in Ruby on Rails. Now it's the next big new shiny thing.

So maybe in 2023 I'll be eating my words, but then again if Falcon is a good language and I need to use it then it should be easy enough to pick it up.

Answer 2

I've downloaded it. It's powerful, flexible, Unicode-aware, and in use in real-world situations, namely as the scripting language for AuroraUX.

Falcon is our scripting language of choice. "Simple, fast and powerful programming language, easy to learn and to feel comfortable with, and a scripting engine ready to empower mission-critical multithreaded applications." -- http://www.auroraux.org/index.php/AuroraUX%3AAbout

Speaking of Unicode, this is a real Falcon script:

// International class; name and street
class 国際( なまえ, Straße )
   // set class name and street address
   नाम = なまえ
   شَارِع   =  Straße
   // Say who am I!
   function 言え!()
     >@"I am $(self.नाम) from ",self.شَارِع
   end
end
// all the people of the world! 
民族 = [ 国際( "高田　Friederich", "台湾" ),
   国際( "Smith Σωκράτης", "Cantù" ),
   国際( "Stanisław Lec", "południow" ) ]

for garçon in 民族: garçon.言え!()

Answer 3

It currently has a small but active developer community and so it's currently at the state where the cool features are really solidifying. Given that the interpreter is currently almost completely unoptimised, it still runs at a very impressive speed.

I know of someone using for all the scripting in their game (replacing Lua) and as far as I know, they've found it a pleasure to use.