Genie

Genie is the newest programming language I've been playing around with lately. To date, my experience has been almost exclusively in interpreted languages, so Genie (a close relative of Vala) is my foray into a true compiled language. Like Vala, Genie code compiles to C code which of course then compiles into a binary executable. In fact, according to Genie's Wikipedia entry, the differences between Genie and Vala are only syntactical--Vala looks like C/C++ and Genie looks Python-esque. The valac compiler is used to compile both languages.

Unfortunately, Genie has only been in active development since 2008 and documentation is sparse and almost useless and my few attempts at using the language have been foiled by absurd errors. Most recently, I tried to declare a list (a basic Genie data structure) exactly how the Genie tutorial showed and it threw an error. You can view the specifics in the StackOverflow question I asked here.

When it matures, I really look forward to using Genie as it seems to offer the simplicity and sanity of Python with all the advantages of being a compiled language. The silly Vala overhead is gone
I'm really looking forward to:

• Stability
• Proper documentation (and a stronger community, which of course comes with time and adoption)
• Better debugging
• Vim syntax highlighting support

In the meanwhile, as long as I stick with using the language, I plan to file bugs and produce tutorials here. Then again, I'm a pretty flaky blogger so we'll see how that goes.