▲Functional Programming in hica(hica.dev)
41 points by cladamski79 3 days ago | 7 comments
▲blanched 4 hours ago
Quick fyi that your website is “zoomed in” on mobile safari and a little difficult to use

(Apologies if it’s just my device)

I’ll take a closer look on my desktop later today, I love seeing new programming languages. Sounds interesting!

▲cladamski79 12 minutes ago
I took a look and added -webkit-text-size-adjust to please Safari, hope it helps. And thanks!
▲tgv 3 hours ago
Same here. Needs one of those "standard" html headers, I think.
▲lioeters 1 hour ago
Hm, I checked the site and it does have one of these:

  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
Which is the standard. I wonder if something else is interfering with it.
▲xixixao 38 minutes ago
Looks very tasteful! Good job!
▲cladamski79 3 days ago
hica is a functional, expression-based programming language, everything is an expression and immutable by default. Its goal is to make programming very approachable for beginners (and veterans alike). You learn by doing small programs, then dive deeper on a thing you really want to build.

This is a guide on functional programming which covers immutability, higher-order functions, pipelines, and more, all with runnable examples.

If that is to theoretical there is https://www.hica.dev/docs/hica-for-beginners/ that walks through functions, pattern matching, and lists by building real programs.

Happy to answer questions about the design decisions, the implementation or how to get started.

▲smw 1 hour ago
Any concurrency / parallelism?
▲cladamski79 35 minutes ago
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▲ 5 hours ago
▲alfanick 3 hours ago
Any examples of bigger and practical projects written in hica?
▲cladamski79 34 minutes ago
I recently posted about tbdflow-ui at https://cladam.github.io/2026/06/30/tbdflow-ui/

There is also the HML spec and a library at https://github.com/cladam/hml

▲nyankosensei 4 hours ago
Thanks for sharing. Very interesting, especially since it’s based on Koka, which I’ve been experimenting with and still trying to wrap my head around. It also reminds me a lot of Shen (https://shenlanguage.org/). I’ll definitely try this out.

How do you pronounce the name?

▲cladamski79 29 minutes ago
I created a backronym of a longwinded name and I pronounce it as hi-ca, or perhaps hee-ca :)

Shen is very interesting, I actually created a lisp in hica as a learning exercise, check it out at https://github.com/cladam/hica-lisp

▲mogoh 3 hours ago
Does this aims to be the python of functional programming languages?
▲cladamski79 27 minutes ago
That's roughly the positioning, yes. Approachable syntax, low ceremony, runs scripts directly. The difference is that the safety guarantees (no null, tracked effects, exhaustive matching) come for free rather than being opt-in via type checkers.

I did a comparison to python which shows the differences, and where they are similar: https://www.hica.dev/docs/hica-vs-python/

▲esafak 3 hours ago
Looks good. If it is not too early to ask, how fast are compile times and executables, and informative are the error messages?
▲cladamski79 25 minutes ago
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▲jdw64 5 hours ago
It feels like C#, so it seems easy to learn. Looks fun.