I spent 30 minutes this morning with the Hare programming language. I've never used this language before, and while I'm sure I've run across it somewhere, I didn't recall anything about it until Preston mentioned it to me yesterday.
I read about the people behind the project and was intrigued, as the number of decent people in technology at the moment is staggeringly small. They seemed cool, so I thought it was worth giving the language a shot.
The first thing that stands-out to me about using Hare is that it's not overly-eager for you to love it. The installation instructions don't tell you to curl some Internet site into your terminal with root permissions to make it easy to install. Instead, it lists a (incredibly short) list of prerequisites and says "Consult the upstream documentation for details regarding the installation of dependencies.". Once the prerequisites are met, building and installing Hare is a simple matter of getting the source and running make and make install.
This might sound crazy but installing software this way took me back to my first experiences with Linux the way smelling lilac takes me back to my childhood bedroom. So refreshing!
As simple and well-documented as this was I still managed to miss a step (installing the standard library and tools) and of course thought I was smarter than the docs ("no hare? Oh you must mean harec... no..?") but this was quickly resolved by re-reading the installation steps and realizing that I had missed one. With installation complete the "Hello World!" program was compiling and I was off and running!
The second exercise in the tutorial gets right into the meat of things and introduces getting input from the terminal. Once you can to terminal input and output you can write useful software so I've always wondered why so many language tutorials wait so long to introduce this. Almost immediately while explaining the second exercise the haredoc command is introduced which is used to access language documentation (stored locally of course) directly from the tutorial. I was thrilled to see this and doubly so that the tutorial brings it up almost immediately. One of my favorite features of Go is the offline documentation, and while such things are not impossible for other languages the fact that it requires no additional effort to install it and accessing it from the terminal is prioritized is something I really respect.
I won't spoil the rest of the tutorial for you, if you got this far and didn't loose interest I recommend installing Hare and working through the tutorial yourself. Suffice it to say that with only 30 minutes to try it out I was able to produce my first useful program in Hare, something I can't say for most new languages I try to learn.
Given Hare's intention to be a systems programming language (as opposed to an accessible interpreted language, etc.) and goals of being a "100 year programming language", getting to productive in the time it takes to order a pizza is pretty amazing. I'm really looking forward to the next 30 minutes I get to spend with this language...
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026