Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Oxidizing OCaml: Locality

blog.janestreet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 72 posts

Re: Oxidizing OCaml: Locality

#21

Post by moonchrome »

Decabytes wrote: post #20

Is Ocaml actually good or is it a meme that people use it and become obsessed with it. How is the transition if you mostly code imperatively? Are there things that are not ergonomic for it to do like GUIs or games?

Disclaimer : I didn't try Ocaml (weird numeric operators turned me off of it a decade ago) but I did use F# which is supposedly similar.

But I don't know what you mean by imperative - for loops and stuff ? Most languages these days support functional programming concepts. Unless you're coming from C it shouldn't be that groundbreaking.

Note that Ocaml isn't lazy by default like Haskell - now that makes things... interesting I guess.

Re: Oxidizing OCaml: Locality

#22

Post by xixixao »

Decabytes wrote: post #20

Is Ocaml actually good or is it a meme that people use it and become obsessed with it. How is the transition if you mostly code imperatively? Are there things that are not ergonomic for it to do like GUIs or games?

Nowadays my primary concern is readability and understandability. Thrown into a codebase, can I understand what's going on?

OCaml (which at FB was used to write the Flow typechecker and Hack compiler afair) favored higher order functions. I enjoyed playing with these in my Haskel-based introduction course at university, and I even wrote a similar language that favored them.

But I now heavily dislike if `a b c` means "call to a with functions b and c with unknown arguments". I need to read all three (a, b, c) to really get what's going on.

This was my biggest gripe with OCaml as it was used at FB.

(purely syntactically compare this to `a(parent => b(parent), child => c(child))`, for some verbosity I get a clearer syntax - a is the callee, and I got some information about what b and c possible do - this is a contrived example of course).

I think the strength of ML and Haskell got eroded as more "mainstream"y languages got decent type systems (TS/Flow, Hack, Kotlin, even Rust, Python is getting there).

Re: Oxidizing OCaml: Locality

#23

Post by faitswulff »

Decabytes wrote: post #20

Is Ocaml actually good or is it a meme that people use it and become obsessed with it. How is the transition if you mostly code imperatively? Are there things that are not ergonomic for it to do like GUIs or games?

I think it was Steve Klabnik who said that it's basically the version of Rust with a garbage collector that people ask for. Might have been this episode of Oxide and Friends: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1208089

Re: Oxidizing OCaml: Locality

#24

Post by saghm »

malkia wrote: post #15
HyperSane wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using obscure works makes some people feel smart.

Explain std::launder then - https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/utility/launder - it's simple word, mostly used when talking about dirty money ;) - but hey - I've still no idea how/when/why to use it... ;)

Using simple words in confusing contexts also makes people feel smart. Essentially any way of being technically correct in confusing ways has this effect; "I'm so much smarter that you can't even understand _why_ I'm right" is too juicy a flex for some people to avoid.

Re: Oxidizing OCaml: Locality

#25

Post by hardwaregeek »

xixixao wrote: post #22
Decabytes wrote: post #20

Is Ocaml actually good or is it a meme that people use it and become obsessed with it. How is the transition if you mostly code imperatively? Are there things that are not ergonomic for it to do like GUIs or games?

Nowadays my primary concern is readability and understandability. Thrown into a codebase, can I understand what's going on? OCaml (which at FB was used to write the Flow typechecker and Hack compiler afair) favored higher order functions. I enjoyed playing with these in my Haskel-based introduction course at university, and I even wrote a similar language that favored them. But I now heavily dislike if `a b c` means…

Yeah I think it’s kind of like how pg wrote about how using lisp gave him a disproportionate advantage. Sure, when people used fewer dependencies and the alternatives were C++, Python v1, and Perl, but these days a lot of languages have Lisp features and the cost of using a niche language is worse dependencies and tooling.

Re: Oxidizing OCaml: Locality

#26

Post by hardwaregeek »

I’ve been critical of OCaml, but I gotta hand it to them, it does feel like the language is going through a renaissance. It’ll be interesting if 5-10 years down the line it manages to significantly improve the usability story while also adding on modes and unboxed types. I’m more focused on usability but these features are compelling too.

Re: Oxidizing OCaml: Locality

#27

Post by yawaramin »

lpw25 wrote: post #19
yafbum wrote: post #7

This is a great idea, but I have questions * Is there a process for upstreaming this into the mainline language, or is this essentially JaneStML now? * Why choose such an obscure word as `exclave` to indicate return-value optimization? How about `return local` or something similarly approachable?

Our long term aim is to upstream all of our work from our branch of the OCaml compiler. Of course, that is contingent on the ideas we’re developing there being accepted by the community. There are two main reasons we work on our own branch: 1. Language design is hard. At Jane Street we have a great opportunity to design new features, test them extensively in a realistic environment, and then change them. Because we h…

I was reading the post and thinking 'glocal' :-D

Re: Oxidizing OCaml: Locality

#28

Post by yawaramin »

xixixao wrote: post #22
Decabytes wrote: post #20

Is Ocaml actually good or is it a meme that people use it and become obsessed with it. How is the transition if you mostly code imperatively? Are there things that are not ergonomic for it to do like GUIs or games?

Nowadays my primary concern is readability and understandability. Thrown into a codebase, can I understand what's going on? OCaml (which at FB was used to write the Flow typechecker and Hack compiler afair) favored higher order functions. I enjoyed playing with these in my Haskel-based introduction course at university, and I even wrote a similar language that favored them. But I now heavily dislike if `a b c` means…

Readability is very subjective and also people get used to syntax. Elm is widely considered to be one of the most readable syntaxes by its users.

Re: Oxidizing OCaml: Locality

#29

Post by yawaramin »

Decabytes wrote: post #20

Is Ocaml actually good or is it a meme that people use it and become obsessed with it. How is the transition if you mostly code imperatively? Are there things that are not ergonomic for it to do like GUIs or games?

You could always try it out and see for yourself :-)

Here's a pretty good article about the transition: https://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/06/06/python-to-ocaml-re...

Re: Oxidizing OCaml: Locality

#30

Post by steveklabnik »

faitswulff wrote: post #23
Decabytes wrote: post #20

Is Ocaml actually good or is it a meme that people use it and become obsessed with it. How is the transition if you mostly code imperatively? Are there things that are not ergonomic for it to do like GUIs or games?

I think it was Steve Klabnik who said that it's basically the version of Rust with a garbage collector that people ask for. Might have been this episode of Oxide and Friends: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1208089

Rust was originally described to me as “Rust and C have a baby,” so yeah I’ve been a fan of this kind of thinking for a long time.
Post reply on HN