Inspired by this blog post on “programming languages that will change how you think” I was looking forward to trying the concurrent (parallel) by default ones. So last night I decided to get and build anic (built no problem on NetBSD) and give it a whirl. Only to be met with the disappointing news at the top of the tutorial that in it’s current state it doesn’t actually work and worse isn’t ever likely to be fixed as it’s been abandoned! I’d assumed because there was a fair bit written about in the article the author had actually tried it. Perhaps there is a previous commit point when it did work?

So I decided to try Plaid instead only to discover that it requires the JVM and Windows, which is the equivalent of Ani’s abandonment as far as I am concerned.

Ani is a dataflow language, apparently, so I found this list of alternatives. Of those E and CAL looked most promising, but under further investigation both of those require the JVM; E used to have a Common Lisp implementation, but as far as I can tell it’s no longer around.

Hmmm, doesn’t look like I’ll be able to appease my curiosity on this occasion.