Ask HN: What is the best non mainstream programming language or stack in 2026?

LLMs let you choose the best language / stack for the problem you’re solving. My experience is that I’m able to build very performant Rust to solve some niche problems without having written a line of Rust code in my life. Without LLMs I would have defaulted to the languages I know and/or produce sub-par results trying to do in Rust.

I choose the best language / stack / framework for my use-case and then focus on building.

There is a lot of minutia and details in languages, frameworks, etc that I largely ignore whereas a few years ago I would actively try to convince someone to use some stack XYZ because of reasons.

With LLMs, I choose tooling based on the task.

If I need to do some systems level engineering, I’ll reach for Go or Rust. There is generally no reason to use Rust first, because 99% of us will not need 99 percentile performance. I also find Rust to be a tougher language. 98 percentile performance with Go is fine, where there are usually one or at most 3 ways to do something.

If I need web API services, I’ll use typescript for the ecosystem. Most providers offer SDKs and the broader ecosystem is rich. I can use node or bun, and these services can scale nicely at a reasonable $/maintenance/performance ratio.

I’ll reach for Docker because compute is now expensive and dedicated hosting is cheaper than AWS/GCP. I can get a 2020-2022 processor with 128gb RAM and generous bandwidth for $100-200 a month.

Just built HN BigHits

"BigHits is a TypeScript 5 application using Svelte 5, SvelteKit 2 and Vite 5, with the Node.js adapter. It runs on Node.js 26 with npm 11.20.0 through Phusion Passenger and includes server-side API endpoints and a separate background TTS worker."

You can ask: "For hosting: can this app can be distributed across multiple 'boxes' with varying prices? How to optimize for ____?"

And then arrive at some sort of hybrid solution. The hosting environment is key - that informs of the possible stack choices.

So "know the canvas you are starting on, and then optimize on these as pre-requisites according to the intended direction" is the takeaway.

Isn't that what life's about or should be about? Or else answering, "how to take the non-mainstream, mainstream?"

If you enjoyed Lisp, you should definitely check out Scheme, Racket, and Clojure. Scheme is my personal favourite language. OCaml is also great.

I use s7 Scheme hosted inside C apps. One of the cool things about Scheme is that are a lot of different ways of using it. (embedded, compiling to C, standalone, etc).

OxCaml is interesting you can choose the layout of the memory and finely tune the GC https://oxcaml.org/

I always enjoyed clojure. It had a steeper learning curve than something like python, but you could build really powerful systems and abstractions. Now a lot of that joy is gone and you're probably best off going for the most performant language (ex. Rust, go etc)

Rust + Typescript is all you need

I still prefer vanilla TypeScript whether writing a browser application, command line application, or both. The language is extremely mainstream but the mere mention of not using common abstractions will trigger holy wars from people who cannot program.

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