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The Future of Standard ML (2013) [pdf]

cs.cmu.edu

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Re: The Future of Standard ML (2013) [pdf]

#31

Post by andrzejsz »

cwyers wrote: post #11
virtualwhys wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming from Scala I'd like to see successor ML become a reality. Whether it's 1ML, Ponyo, Ur (without the /Web), or another ML derivative that's not OCaml (petty, but the crufty syntax makes Scala seem elegant in this regard) isn't all that important. As it stands every year Rossberg publishes a paper on latest 1ML enhancements; Harper does the same wrt to PLT, and by proxy SML. Meanwhile, nothing's really happening…

I find it interesting that you list all of the ML derivatives except the popular one.

Maybe its not that popular but I would mention ATS programming language http://www.ats-lang.org

Re: The Future of Standard ML (2013) [pdf]

#32

Post by dukerutledge »

Peaker wrote: post #10
eatonphil wrote: post #2

Cutting to the chase: use Haskell or Scala or F# if you need to do some scripting or build a web application that requires lots of different tasks (being a web server, rendering templates, connecting to a database, etc.). Haskell and Scala have great libraries and polymorphism that allows you to express things succinctly. Dunno much about F# except .NET. Use OCaml if you want easily native binaries, predictable perfo…

Many icons are well known and work well. The back, forward, reload buttons are more usable as icons than text. When not overused, operators are similarly more usable than verbose English names.

Totally agree. There was a great example on /r/haskell the other day.

https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/4sdkch/haskel_newb...

Operators are certainly overused in Haskell, but sometimes they make something so much more readable.

Re: The Future of Standard ML (2013) [pdf]

#33

Post by jonsterling »

cwyers wrote: post #15
hroman wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poly/ML?

No. I mean, I know Tiobe isn't great, but the only ML-derivative I see on the top 50 is F#. ML and OCaml crack the top 100.

F# doesn't even have modules. Not really in the SML spirit—it's like if you combined Classic/LCF ML from the 1970s with C#.

Re: The Future of Standard ML (2013) [pdf]

#34

Post by agentgt »

cwyers wrote: post #22
groovy2shoes wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F# is an OCaml derivative. I'd reckon that OP's feelings about F# would be rather similar to their feelings about OCaml.

The only objection to OCaml is "the crufty syntax," which I think F# has taken steps to improve upon.

I'm sort of sick of hearing that OCaml has crappy or crufty syntax. I like OCaml's syntax. There is just a sea of useless algol brackets in so many languages. I was sort of sad that Rust fell victim to the damn bracket. At times I don't even think Scala is that much more succinct than modern Java 8 (ala bracket indentation fun).

I remember years ago (15 years.. jesus I'm old) discovering OCaml and I couldn't believe how terse the language was for producing native code. If anything I don't like about OCaml syntax is that it actually has an enormous amount of syntactic sugar.

Re: The Future of Standard ML (2013) [pdf]

#36

Post by owyn »

virtualwhys wrote: post #6
eatonphil wrote: post #2

Cutting to the chase: use Haskell or Scala or F# if you need to do some scripting or build a web application that requires lots of different tasks (being a web server, rendering templates, connecting to a database, etc.). Haskell and Scala have great libraries and polymorphism that allows you to express things succinctly. Dunno much about F# except .NET. Use OCaml if you want easily native binaries, predictable perfo…

Coming from Scala I'd like to see successor ML become a reality. Whether it's 1ML, Ponyo, Ur (without the /Web), or another ML derivative that's not OCaml (petty, but the crufty syntax makes Scala seem elegant in this regard) isn't all that important. As it stands every year Rossberg publishes a paper on latest 1ML enhancements; Harper does the same wrt to PLT, and by proxy SML. Meanwhile, nothing's really happening…

What about Facebook's Reason? It's an alternate syntax for OCaml that hooks into the existing OCaml compiler toolchain.

https://facebook.github.io/reason/

Looks like they've used it to build all kinds of stuff (including the Hack/PHP compiler).

Re: The Future of Standard ML (2013) [pdf]

#37

Post by jxy »

rvense wrote: post #19
jxy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> operators (not named functions) are to programming > languages as icon-only buttons are to web pages; > they are completely unusable. I see ( ) ; . you are using already. Latin letters are gibberish to people who don't use it.

I wrote some Scala just today: val list = a +: l :+ b And I knew I had to put in a comment because that stuff always makes my eyes cross over when I come back to it.

  もっと練習  ⍝ Practice more  NB. ⍝ is a symbol for comment.
  /* NB. is for comment, too. */
  // Anything inside /* */ is comment, too.
  #  // starts a comment, too.

Re: The Future of Standard ML (2013) [pdf]

#38

Post by billrobertson42 »

pmontra wrote: post #28
rvense wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote some Scala just today: val list = a +: l :+ b And I knew I had to put in a comment because that stuff always makes my eyes cross over when I come back to it.

I don't know Scala and I have no idea of what +: :+ means, which at first is not a good sign (think about onboarding.) Then I remembered that many mainstream languages have the a ? b : c construct which maybe was equally puzzling when it was introduced by CPL in 1963.

Scala can be extended by users with stuff like that.

Re: The Future of Standard ML (2013) [pdf]

#39

Post by marktangotango »

bboreham wrote: post #35
equalunique wrote: post #12

I'm just glad to a an "ML" article that's referring to MetaLanguage and not Machine Learning.

I always took it to be Milner Language. Prof Milner was my first CS lecturer, many years ago. Ironically the language for that course was Pascal.

That is amazing, how was he as a lecturer?

Re: The Future of Standard ML (2013) [pdf]

#40

Post by auggierose »

pklausler wrote: post #29

I revere ML and loved using it back in the day, but I code now in Haskell and am even happier. I like never having to figure out what parts of a program or library are referentially transparent. Why would I ever want to use an impure language again?

Maybe because you need to write some performant code?
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