Mara is a new programming language designed to be fast, fun, and functional. The core features of Mara are multi-dispatch and pattern matching, with support for rich destructuring. It is a dynamic-static hybrid with a flexible type system based on structural, ad-hoc polymorphism.
- Multiple dispatch
- Pattern matching
- Flexible, classless object system.
- "Raw" native types
- Hybrid memory management
- Type inference
- Dependency injection
Okay, it doesn't offer all of those features today, but it will as development progressses. Some of the driving principles behind Mara are:
- Code should write code.
- Be explicit but don't repeat yourself.
- Guesswork is the root of all evil.
- Every symbol should have one meaning in all contexts.
Below is a simple implimentation of a program like the unix tree utility.
module main
using 'core'
argv = inject 'sys.argv'
max_depth = inject 'tree.max_depth' { 20 }
path_arg = argv[0] else raise "I need a file!"
path = path_arg.Path else raise
indent = Int.parse argv[1] else 4
do (path: path, indent: 0, depth: 0) {
raise "Maximum recursion depth reached" if depth > max_depth
files, folders = FS.ls(path).partition def(f){ f.is_file }
def String::indented { " ".repeat(indent) ++ this }
print file.name.indented for file in files
for folder in folders {
print folder.name.indented
self(folder, indent + 2)
}
}
end main
Mara strives to be a general purpose programming language, useful for everything from utilities to web services to distributed computing frameworks. If you're a Pythonista or Ruby hacker looking for more structure, a Java developer tired of boilerplate, or a C# programmer ready to move past inheritence, Mara might appeal to you. If you're writing embedded code, operating systems, or high performance browser engines, you'll probably be better served by Rust.