Good news is I can offer you parentheses, but they are indeed optional on conditionals/loops. I am fairly sure there are other C-style syntaxes that leave those out. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2061593/why-do-c-languag... - you can't have the same ambiguity if you have mandatory braces around the body. Would there be a reason to require them?

With that said, this will work just fine and you wouldn't have to think about it too hard, if at all:

  func main() {
    if (1 == 2) {
      println("oh no!");
    } else {       
      println("phew!");
    }
  }

On the more general point, why this vs. anything else? That's a great question. I have tried to hit a balance that I think is pleasant to write code in (e.g. I like not having __init__.aria files around to define modules :-), and I like having proper enums, and so on...). I like to think someone would pick up Aria because it is a fun little language to try out and experiment with, not because it would change the world.

Mileage may of course vary and you may think that balance is actually nowhere to be seen. That's great, hit me with it.

I hadn't really looked at Nushell, but it (process control) is definitely something I plan to improve in Aria (https://github.com/egranata/aria/issues/21). Right now I have a simple system() wrapper, but not much in terms of advanced subprocess control. Maybe worth investing some time in cleaning up?

I have tried to fill the niche of "scratch my itches, please", which means Aria is intended to feel smooth, pleasant and simple to write in. There are still things I want to improve before calling it a 1.0, but the general theme is, a general purpose scripting language with just enough structure and as little ceremony as possible.

It may be that I struck the wrong balance somewhere (and I know of a few places, e.g. operator overloading - I plan to rewire the syntax), and that would be great to get eyes on and get feedback!

Just a side note, roc-lang is being rewritten in Zig[0]

[0] https://gist.github.com/rtfeldman/77fb430ee57b42f5f2ca973a39...

The current implementation looks like a compiler to a stack-based bytecode with a straightforward textbook interpreter. For example, here is the interpretation of the Add bytecode: https://github.com/egranata/aria/blob/master/vm-lib/src/vm.r...

So to a very rough first approximation, performance characteristics should be in CPython's ballpark.

I just noticed this comment a few days late, so sorry for the delay in answering

Goals are documented in a roadmap doc: https://egranata.github.io/aria/ROADMAP.html as well as issues on GitHub, and ideas are always very welcome, so please bring yours! I'd love to chat

I am not (yet) focused on performance, it's still at a point where the language and the library are changing. It runs decently well (as mentioned it's a stack based VM) such that you could actually use it to write some real programs. Good enough for a 0.9 I think

Technical choices, I have a few big ideas that stand behind the overall design: - easy to pick up, flexible, run with, write code, "pleasing to the eye" is what you called, that's #1; - a simple module system that works with you (with more improvements in the roadmap); - easier to reason about errors (lots of things are Maybe/Result-style enums vs. exceptions) - this is somewhat inspired by Midori where errors are classified according to whether you can and should handle them (with exceptions as a somewhat middle ground); - using Rust under the hood provides stronger memory safety guarantees than things written in C/C++ would out of the box (I have seen the occasional stack overflow error, and even that I would consider a bug, but no segfault core dump using Aria); - no inheritance, prefer composition, reuse via mixins which are first class in Aria - I found this works quite nicely (for example, I can provide all comparison operators based on one function + a mixin: https://github.com/egranata/aria/blob/master/lib/aria/orderi...)

Thanks for all the questions!

Agreed. Feels like "a scripting language for C developers who hate JavaScript"

This has been a pretty frequent source of feedback, and while I had ideas on that in my head, clearly I did not communicate them well enough

I updated the website & README with more of a rationale/viewpoint of why Aria exists. Please take another look: https://github.com/egranata/aria/blob/master/README.md

No. Should it? i.e. would it be useful/valuable to do for a scripting language? I am happy to hear suggestions and thoughts on that. Open a GitHub issue & let's chat?

I am not familiar, can you point me in that direction?