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Work · alternatives · 2026

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24 alternatives to Fluent, tiny lang for reactivity and autograd

After six months of work, I am here again presenting Fluent – a tiny lang which is optimized for differentiable & reactive programming. Since I am not Conal Elliot, don't expect a beautiful theoretical unification of FRP and AD from first principles. Rather, a horrific monster that holds together mostly because a lot of duct-tape. The link points to the semi-interactive tour of the language, which will get the job done much better than I could in here. Hope you hate/like it!

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Learn a new language while you live your life

    2021 · fluent.co · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    Fluent▲119

    Agentic AI in Any Mac App. Now with Native RAG

    Jan 2026 · fluentmac.app · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Trying to do gradient descent using automatic differentiation over branchy programs? Or to combine them with neural networks for end-to-end training? Then this might be interesting to you. We develped DiscoGrad, a tool for automatic differentiation through C++ programs involving input-dependent control flow (e.g., "if (f(x) < c) { ... }", differentiating wrt. x) and randomness. Our initial motivation was to enable the use of gradient descent with simulations, which often rely heavily on such discrete branching. The latter makes plain autodiff mostly useless, since it can only account for the…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hello HN! The day has finally come to stop adding features and start sharing what I've been building the last 5-6 months. It's a bit of CrewAI, OpenDevon, LangFuse&#x2F;Cloud all in one, providing devs who prefer TypeScript an integrated framework thats provides a lot out of the box to start experimenting and building agents with. It started after peeking at the LangChain docs a few times and never liking the example code. I began experimenting with automating a simple Jira request from the engineering team to add an index to one of our Google Spanner databases (for context I'm the…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    See what it’s like to program in a language without null.

    2015 · books.thoughtbot.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6MW
  7. 7IM

    just a wack systems dude tbh

    2018 · h313.info · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    My implementation of Thorsten Bell's book (Writing an Interpreter in Go) - actuallyachraf/monkey-giggle

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9
  10. 10

    A minimal "@ moving around a hardcoded map" implemented in a bunch of languages, some by me and some contributed by others. A slightly more interesting riff on the Hello World or 99 Bottles of Beer theme. More languages or improvements on existing ones would be nice :) There's a github repo at: https://github.com/nrkn/SimpleRL

    2011 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hi HN, I'm the creator of Mach (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;octalide&#x2F;mach or https:&#x2F;&#x2F;machlang.org). Two days ago, we finally achieved full self hosting. I wanted to make a post here to show off the language since this is a big milestone for us. ## TL;DR about the language for those curious: - There are no external dependencies anywhere in the pipeline. This includes LLVM, libc bindings, or anything of the sort (save for the historical bootstrap compiler, which requires any C compiler and has been phased out completely). - Mach is extremely opinionated and very…

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Hi HN! I kept hearing about Lisp and why it was special but didn't have a great place to start. I wanted something self-contained that helped me develop intuition rather than fluency. My hope is this is helpful for casual programmers, professionals from other fields who interact with code, or engineers who haven't had much exposure to interpreters or compilers. Hope this helps anyone else who's curious about getting a sense of Lisp and what makes it special with a limited time investment! Feedback or other cool Lisp things welcome :)

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13BA

    Hi all, I've been working on a new programming language called Blade for a couple of months now and think it's time I introduced it to people and get reactions and feedbacks. Plus, I need people to test it and find the bugs in it. The repository is at https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;blade-lang&#x2F;blade and the documentation is in progress and going great at bladelang.com and even though I wanted to wait to write everything before I do this before, I think it's best to get started with letting people know about it now. There are lots of tests in the repository and experienced developers…

    2021 · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Compiler Backend for LSTS (High-Level Typed Macro Assembler) - andrew4328/lambda-mountain

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hi all, I threw together a small prototype I am calling “Notepad.ai”. A new take on UIs for interacting with LLMs. While I enjoy using LLM’s in the chat format I wanted to see what it would be like to do it in a more long form style. It let’s you write in a pretty free form, much like Window’s Notepad, but you can choose to hit ctrl+[ to analyze the text with a preset prompt of your choosing. It has a few other small features. It’s WIP and very experimental. I would appreciate any feedback or thoughts. Video: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ntdlgFmSxQY Live Demo:…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    A high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language

    2017 · julialang.org · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    I’ve had this idea for a new code editor chord grammar bouncing around in my head for over 2 years, and now I can finally release v0.1 of ane. You can run it one-shot from scripts or agents (`ane exec —chord…`) or use its full-on TUI editor. ane is pure Rust, and integrates tree-sitter and LSP to provide a pleasant and predictable terminal code editing experience. I’d love folks to try it out and give feedback! Thanks :)

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18PR

    http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quill.org We are a nonprofit organization, and Quill is a free, open source tool. We are looking for feedback on our user experience and our code optimization. Critical feedback is appreciated. If you'd like to check out the code: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;empirical-org&#x2F;quill

    2013 · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    I've seen a lot of comments about how complex frameworks like LangChain can be. Over the holidays, I wanted to see how minimal an LLM framework could get if we stripped away everything non-essential. The result is an LLM framework in just 100 lines of code. These 100 lines capture what I see as the core abstraction of most LLM frameworks: a nested directed graph that breaks down tasks into multiple LLM steps, with branching and recursion to enable agent-like decision-making. From there, you can layer on more advanced features like agents, RAG, task decomposition, and more. I’ve intentionally…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;PlumeCat&#x2F;tack Hi HN! Tack is a scripting language I've been working on sporadically for the past year or so, and intensely for the past few weeks. It originated out of a desire for something that was like Lua, but with a more familiar syntax, and without some of the other surprises in Lua such as the 1-indexed tables. It's also been a great learning project, and a very satisfying challenge! While the current version is early beta at best, I hope to continue working on it and maybe see some adoption. Despite the relative lack of optimization, I'm very…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21SN

    Hi guys, I've been thinking a lot about how advancements in NLP can be standardized; when building a sentiment analysis, you know for sure that other attributes than the actual sentiment can be highly interesting, such as the urgency. Together with my team, I started a new open-source project, aiming to do exactly that. It's called bricks, and it is a composition of more than 50 open-source and modular code snippets, such as computing sentence complexities, emotionality detection and many more. For context, the idea came up after watching the incredible talk "Inventing on Principle" by Bret…

    2022 · bricks.kern.ai · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Fully leaned into vibe coding this time around. Started on v0, at some point ejected into running locally (getting v0's exported folder to run locally was a challenge), then iterated with Cursor over the course of a few hours. Really neat how much can be accomplished just conversationally these days.

    2025 · macrodata-refinement.arjit.me · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Keyword-free functional language with prototype objects.

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24WS

    This is the first project I haven't written a single line of code. The entire codebase was prompt generated in Cursor using mostly Claude Sonnet 4.5. It's also the first time I'm genuinely happy with the end result from AI coding. What do you think?

    Dec 2025 · wordsnake.co · its alternatives →

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