Fantom: a new language to learn

Today I discovered Fantom - a surprisingly interesting language that seems to get so many things right. My first thought was to re-implement Joey in it. We'll see.

The language is definitely interesting - especially considering 2 brothers built it in the (mostly) spare time.

Things to learn from/use:

• Fan(tom) is self hosting, ie the compiler is written in fan itself. So building it from source involves using an older release of fan. This is pretty standard in compiler land, I guess, but still novel to me; and probably novel in that the although the final executable is a native binary, it goes through intermediate non-binary output levels
• It compiles to its own intermediate code called fcode, primarily because the original intent was to be able to generate code that worked the same on Java and dotnet.
• Javascript compile - sweet.
• The FWT toolkit - havent started using it yet, but any library that allows declarative UI is good in my book. Especially since the same fan source can be used to generate  web ui a la extJS.
• It also seems to have a fluent api to building html - another nice thing
• Units (a la Frink) and a datetime api with durations built in.

PS: When I saw the link in LtU I half expected it to be inspired by the Phantom, but apparently not. I have decided, however, that if I do develop in fantom, the projects will be Phantom themed :)