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We chose OCaml to write Stategraph

stategraph.dev

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Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph

#41

Post by whobre »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #7

I like OCaml and have written the "why we chose XYZ language" posts. Most of the time the real answer is "we like it and it makes us feel good to use it". Like the answers aren't wrong per se but they're more post-facto justifications. And that's perfectly fine! I think we should normalize saying that tech stack choices are subjective and preference-based. We're not robots. The social and aesthetic parts of a stack m…

Using something you enjoy is fine, as long as you don’t forget the person who is going to maintain your code after you move on.

Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph

#42

Post by e12e »

galangalalgol wrote: post #20
gregwebs wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Functional programming is immutable by default. TypeScript and many other typed languages don't really stop you from clobbering things, particularly with concurrency. Rust does. But immutability with GC is a lot easier to use than Rust if you don't need the performance of Rust.

But what is functional besides haskell? Purescript? Elm I guess. Ocaml is not. It has for loops even. You can write pure functional ocaml but people don't. It mattered a lot less when it didn't have true concurrency, but now clobbering things in ocaml is quite possible.

StandardML (standard metalanguage), scheme?

Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph

#43

Post by internet_points »

jacquesm wrote: post #5
laszlojamf wrote: post #4

I don't really get what's special about OCaml with these points they raise? Wouldn't almost any strongly typed language do? Wouldn't TypeScript also tick all these boxes? EDIT: I wouldn't choose TypeScript either for this type of use case, but not for the reasons they state, that's my point

It's the combination with concurrency that makes this a hard problem. And OCaml excels at solving that sort of problem. OCaml and Erlang are the only two languages that I'm aware of that have a really clean way of doing this, in most other languages there is always some kind of kludge or hack to make it work and at best you're going to do something probabilistic: it seems to work, even under load, so it probably is g…

What advantage does OCaml have over Haskell here? I find software transactional memory in Haskell so simple to work with that I have lost all fear of concurrency, but what am I missing out on?

Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph

#44

Post by schonfinkel »

pjmlp wrote: post #32
sausagefeet wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the CTO of Terrateam. For "why not rust", I have found the downsides of Rust not compelling enough to use it. We don't need close-to-metal performance. We don't really need the borrow checker, a GC is fine. We are immutable by default so the borrow checker doesn't help much there.

Great choice by way, I feel too many reach out for Rust, because they lack the perspective ML type systems are not something introduced by Rust, rather a long linage of languages since ML/Standard ML.

Plus, OCaml kept the SML tradition in its robust module system, with modules as first-class citizens and ML-style functors, this is something hard to see nowadays, even among ML-inspired languages.

Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph

#45

Post by galangalalgol »

greener_grass wrote: post #27
galangalalgol wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what is functional besides haskell? Purescript? Elm I guess. Ocaml is not. It has for loops even. You can write pure functional ocaml but people don't. It mattered a lot less when it didn't have true concurrency, but now clobbering things in ocaml is quite possible.

Define functional? Even Haskell is not functional in the strictest sense. It has unsafe IO. It can throw exceptions. Functions may not halt.

Fair. Agda, gallina, f* maybe?

My point was that without any escape hatches or magic you can code a segfault starting in ocaml5. That may be true of haskell? It is true of rust too, though the only known way to do it isn't something that is likely to happen by accident and is tracked as a bug. In ocaml5 if you use domain, it is down to experience skill, and some luck to be sure you used atomic when necessary. I'm a bad programmer despite going on four decades of experience. I'm not even remotely methodical. If I adopt ocaml for a project I'm using 4 or adding something that fails the pipeline if it finds domain anywhere.

Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph

#46

Post by markstos »

My concern for a team language choice is "How hard is going to be be hire people to write in this language effectively and how much will /they/ enjoy it?"

It's one thing to pick a language that I like and am productive in, it's another to choose a language for a larger team.

If you've found an full team of motivated and capable OCaml coders, great.

Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph

#47

Post by galangalalgol »

e12e wrote: post #42
galangalalgol wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what is functional besides haskell? Purescript? Elm I guess. Ocaml is not. It has for loops even. You can write pure functional ocaml but people don't. It mattered a lot less when it didn't have true concurrency, but now clobbering things in ocaml is quite possible.

StandardML (standard metalanguage), scheme?

Doesn't scheme have a set macro? I think for purity you'd have to go to something used for proofs that doesn't actually interact with the world.

Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph

#48

Post by yanis_t »

sgarland wrote: post #38

TIL (via a rabbit hole after reading this) that a good type system removes an absurd amount of boilerplate validation code.

This is pretty much obvious for people migrated from JavaScript to TypeScript and suddenly realised that most of their unit tests can now go to a trash bin.

Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph

#49

Post by internet_points »

cyberpunk wrote: post #2

> Most systems handle this defensively with locks and runtime validation. So i work at an org with 1000s of terraform repos, we use the enterprise version which locks workspaces during runs etc. everywhere else i’ve worked, we either just use some lock mechanism or only do applies from a specific branch and CI enforces they run one at a time. My question is: who is this aimed at and what problem is it actually solvin…

Back in the day, before git, we had RCS. Developers would just lock files when they worked on them, and then unlock when they were done. Or you'd copy a folder manually ("branch") to work on things concurrently and then punch them in the shoulder when they forgot to unlock master so that you could lock it and check in. It worked absolutely fine, there were loads of workarounds!

Re: We chose OCaml to write Stategraph

#50

Post by BenGosub »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #7

I like OCaml and have written the "why we chose XYZ language" posts. Most of the time the real answer is "we like it and it makes us feel good to use it". Like the answers aren't wrong per se but they're more post-facto justifications. And that's perfectly fine! I think we should normalize saying that tech stack choices are subjective and preference-based. We're not robots. The social and aesthetic parts of a stack m…

I think that in some cases where OCaml was chosen, like Docker or some parsers, the choice was obviously not evangelical. But I agree that in most cases it is a post-facto justification.
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