So, my experience is twisted into functional, visual and small-scripting side.

In short:

• WM was my first programming language and I built a freelance career on top of it (2014..2021)
• However job market for WM is non-existent, so I switched to Python (2021)
• I couldn’t make myself think in procedural style, so I learned about LISP (macros, lazy evaluation), APL (array-based) and Haskell (purest functional paradigm experience)
• I tried to push LISP/APL/Haskell features into Hy-lang (which is Python LISP-dialect) and understood that I am eventually remaking Python into WM
• So, I decided to go back to WM (2024), accepting the things that got me resented in the first place

Phase I — First Love (WM)

When I started working as a stress engineer, I had lot’s of secondary math tasks, that I had no instrument to solve, so I remembered that my friends at University used WM during education, so I started using it.

I programmed WM somewhere around 2014..2021, and was using it for solving everyday math tasks, building interactive GUI for many of them. I then developed Upwork Career on top of it starting from 2018.

Phase II — Resentment

Eventually (2021) I grew tired of some big WM drawbacks:

• Community is relatively small
• Job market for WM is non-existent
• Sharing/Deploying apps built with WM is essentially not possible
• It is payed and also weights 10Gb+
• No Vim support LOL (although I built my own MAVim plugin to counter-act this, it is not the same as bringing WM to Vim itself)

Also, Python was gaining popularity,

Phase III — Procedural world (Python)

To say I was shocked by procedural and OOP paradigms is an understatement:

• I was surprised that math and programming are too separate things in a world outside of WM haha (for example, plotting simple graph required learning separate library, wtf)
• Lack of direct support of APL features was making me furious for a long time (for example, my brain just refused to reason about «For» construct instead of Map/Fold in WM)
• Eventually I kind of liked OOP a lot, although necessity of creating them for small scripts felt very clumsy.

As of today I view Python as «at least no worse than 3/5 but in literally everything».

But back then dissatisfied with procedural experience, I stared looking into taking formal training in computer science and programming, continuing to work in Python in parallel.

Somewhere there I randomly stumbled upon Scheme and LISP and saw infamous «LISP Curse» be similar to my WM experience.

Eventually I started using Hy — python LISP-dialect (essentially it is just a Python, but with LISP-style sytax; so all Python libs and functions are supported in Hy). It promissed to be a better of 2 worlds: python rich ecosystem and LISP functional paradigm.

Phase IV — recreating WM in Python (Hy)

As you can imagine, I was list-comprehending all over the place. It was much MUCH more closer to programming style that felt natural to me, but I still missed «term-rewriting» part of WM.

I tried PyQt and also really liked DearPyGUI as a GUI lib, but compared to WM it was to slow to build with. And also required lot’s of architectural thinking even for a small app.

Since I felt OOP to be cumbersome, I then turned my view to functional programming (FP) and I learned that «real» FP is not about functions «Map/Apply». Rather, structural operation like «Map» are better attributed to APL-like languages.

And «real» FP is more about pure functions, monads and state-less programming.

Deep understanding of monads seemed to be impossible without Haskell, so I started to learn it (again in Parallel to Python/Hy).

My plan was to learn some Haskell and get back to Hy with knew knowledge of monads.

Phase V — Back to WM

I was again shocked when I read article on Xae Lee website, that stated that WM was based on LISP and APL — 2 main languages that I discovered during my «WM Resentment» journey.

By this time, I clearly saw that I started making WM from Python using formula WM = Hy/LISP + APL + Haskell. I just thought to myself «what the heck», and since during this journey I gathered lot’s of understanding of what cons and pros are imported for me, I was able to decide to finally be back to WM.