Introduction
Welcome to The Calyxium Programming Language, an introductory book about Calyxium. The Calyxium programming language helps you write faster, reliable software. High-level ergonomics with purity, safety, and speed.
Who Calyxium is For
Calyxium is ideal for many people for a variety of reasons. Let’s look at a few of the most important groups.
Students
Calyxium is for students and those who are interested about learning functional programming concepts. Using Calyxium, many people have learned about topics like expression based languages, immutable variables and polymorphism. The community is very welcoming and happy to answer student questions. Through efforts such as this book, the Calyxium teams want to make functional concepts more accessible to more people, especially those new to programming.
who Is This Book For
This book assumes that you’ve written code in another programming language but doesn’t make any assumptions about which one. We’ve tried to make the material broadly accessible to those from a wide variety of programming backgrounds. We don’t spend a lot of time talking about what programming is or how to think about it. If you’re entirely new to programming, you would be better served by reading a book that specifically provides an introduction to programming. Don't feel threatened if you are new however, as it can be a good brain exercise, and you are also challenging yourself to do something new. Not a lot of people are doing that these days!
How to Use This Book
In general, this book assumes that you’re reading it in sequence from front to back. Later chapters build on concepts in earlier chapters, and earlier chapters might not delve into details on a particular topic but will revisit the topic in a later chapter.
You’ll find two kinds of chapters in this book: concept chapters and project chapters. In concept chapters, you’ll learn about an aspect of Calyxium. In project chapters, we’ll build small programs together, applying what you’ve learned so far. Chapters 2, 12, and 21 are project chapters; the rest are concept chapters.
Chapter 1 explains how to install Calyxium, how to write a “Hello, world!” program.
Chapter 2 is a hands-on introduction to writing a program in Calyxium, having you build up a number guessing game. Here we cover concepts at a high level, and later chapters will provide additional detail. If you want to get your hands dirty right away, Chapter 2 is the place for that.
Chapter 3 covers Calyxium's features that are similar to those of other programming languages. If you’re a particularly meticulous learner who prefers to learn every detail before moving on to the next, you might want to skip Chapter 2 and go straight to Chapter 3, returning to Chapter 2 when you’d like to work on a project applying the details you’ve learned.
Chapter 5 discusses classes, structs and methods, and Chapter 6 covers enums, match expressions, and the if then else control flow construct.
Finally, some appendixes contain useful information about the language in a more reference-like format. Appendix A covers Calyxium’s keywords, Appendix B covers Calyxium’s operators and symbols and Appendix C covers Calyxium's built-in functions.
There is no wrong way to read this book: if you want to skip ahead, go for it! You might have to jump back to earlier chapters if you experience any confusion. But do whatever works for you.
The website version also contains a handy search feature over ↑ which you can use to search for Code Snippets in Appendix D or for anything else you can think of.