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

Why OCaml, why now? (2014)

spyder.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 132 posts

Re: Why OCaml, why now? (2014)

#31

Post by purescript »

jordwalke wrote: post #27
didyoucheckthe wrote: post #4

> The first question I usually get ... is “Why not Haskell?”. > The answer is JavaScript. My current favorite language for this is Elm[1]. It compiles to JS, is based on Haskell, and has a few simple differences between either[2]. Elm doesn't let you use the tons of available Haskell libraries, and makes it slightly painful to integrate with JS. But it's the coolest thing for the web so far. And here's why: It uses a…

Could anyone summarize how well PureScript and Elm treat sourcemaps/debugging in the browser? For a while I thought that js_of_ocaml didn't support sourcemaps, but it turns out, one of my dependencies wasn't compiled with debug flag (-g) and I was able to get a pretty good sourcemaps/debugging experience in Chrome dev tools once I fixed that issue. Is there something js_of_ocaml can learn from PureScript/Elm's JS com…

I can't really comment on source maps in Elm, but the approach in PureScript has been to generate clean, readable JS which is debuggable directly. Source maps are on the roadmap, but not really a priority right now. I haven't heard any complaints about the ability to debug compiled PureScript yet.

Re: Why OCaml, why now? (2014)

#32

Post by lomnakkus »

didyoucheckthe wrote: post #10
jarcane wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purescript[1] is also gaining some traction and even has a pretty nice looking book out. [2] It has some changes however; most notably it's strictly evaluated rather than lazy, and there are differences in how it handles type variables. [3] Personally though, I've grown more fond of F# than Haskell; I only wish the documentation for Websharper and Funscript was more solid. [1] http://www.purescript.org/ [2] https://l…

Elm is actually 3 things rolled into one: 1. an language very similar to Haskell 2. a set of runtime libraries 3. a technique for modeling a GUI as a declarative state machine PureScript only competes with #1 and #2 here. Where Elm really shines is #3, which #2 helps with a lot. Technically #3 could be done in any language. But it really helps to model it in such an expressive language with immutable data and no side…

You can probably implement Elm in PureScript pretty trivially, AFAICT. AFAIK Elm doesn't have any static guarantees about lack-of-space leaks or lack-of-time leaks. Or, maybe it just lacks higher-order-signals? (Which would mostly prevent those sorts of things happening). I found Neel Krishnaswami's papers on a static way to decide/prevent these things statically very interesting. I haven't found any implementation of his ideas, but they seem pretty solid: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~krishnan/

Re: Why OCaml, why now? (2014)

#33

Post by carterschonwald »

tel wrote: post #14
jordwalke wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bunch of other nice features of OCaml such as named arguments, fast compile times, strictness, c-types, and reasonable records. To achieve (some of the feature in) Elm style "structural subtyping" records in OCaml you use the more verbose "object" keyword which is just a record with row polymorphism. Most choose to stick with standard records because they compile to more efficient code. I think the ML modul…

Total agreement about most of those things, but I want to indicate that Haskell has some amount of row typing available via libraries like Vinyl and it certainly has c-types.

the most recent vinyl version (0.5) https://hackage.haskell.org/package/vinyl-0.5 winds up being a REALLY nice balance of flexibility, good type inference, and a few other things.

Its actually simple enough that for a work project I decided it would be simpler to write a custom version of the same datastructure just to avoid extra deps. (and because I needed some slightly bespoke invariants)

Re: Why OCaml, why now? (2014)

#34

Post by ignoramous »

andrewstuart wrote: post #25

I wanted to like OCaml, mainly for working with Unikernels. When I looked at the syntax it just looked very arcane, which was discouraging.

Might come handy in case you want help yourself get over the seemingly cryptic syntax: http://rigaux.org/language-study/syntax-across-languages/

Re: Why OCaml, why now? (2014)

#35

Post by alayne »

wyager wrote: post #19

I honestly don't get how people can claim that Haskell is unusually hard to learn. I started learning Haskell with zero functional programming experience, and after getting over that initial pure+functional learning curve (which took two or three weeks of casual learning), it was smooth sailing. Haskell is actually a very simple language compared to popular languages like python or C++; you just have to do a bit of t…

From your website, you appear to be a college student. Perhaps your expectations and uses are different than commercial developers.

Re: Why OCaml, why now? (2014)

#36

Post by lomnakkus »

alayne wrote: post #35
wyager wrote: post #19

I honestly don't get how people can claim that Haskell is unusually hard to learn. I started learning Haskell with zero functional programming experience, and after getting over that initial pure+functional learning curve (which took two or three weeks of casual learning), it was smooth sailing. Haskell is actually a very simple language compared to popular languages like python or C++; you just have to do a bit of t…

From your website, you appear to be a college student. Perhaps your expectations and uses are different than commercial developers.

That's a pretty sad indictment of commercial developers. Or perhaps just the pressures put on said developers :/.

Re: Why OCaml, why now? (2014)

#37

Post by jordwalke »

lomnakkus wrote: post #29
vog wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, provable performance properties are a big plus, caused by making lazy evaluation optional rather than mandatory. This aspect is explained quite well by Robert Harper: https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/yet-another... (although he doesn't mention OCaml, and probably has other, even better future languages, in mind)

Naw, Harper is SML-all-the-way (AFAICT). Btw, Haskell is technically not "lazy", it's "non-strict". Now, I think he has a good point, but I don't think think there's any general consensus within the FP community which one of non-strict/strict is "better". Personally, I don't think there's a "right" answer. Earlier on in my career, I would have said that "non-strict/strict" should have a part of the type of a term, bu…

One thing I find interesting, is that our industry is basically a gigantic sea full of Java/C++ programmers.

Within that ocean, there is a small portion of Functional Programmers who have come to a realization that a set of finer grained abstractions would improve the industry productivity at large.

Within that small subset, you have a set of people who believe that static type systems aren't ready for widespread use or are too cumbersome for expressive programming in many cases. While the other part of the functional camp are convinced that modern type systems (usually the ML variety) are more than sufficient for expressive programming.

Within the ML static typing camp you have people who adamantly claim that in order for static type systems to be sufficiently expressive, you must have a particular kind of polymorphism, or that this kind of polymorphism must be implicit - not explicit. Or they might form a stance along the lines of strictness vs non-strictness.

Then within the strictness camp, for example, some people will form a stance that your language must be formally specified (SML) as opposed to having only a reference implementation (OCaml).

At the end of the day, we're left with a handful of people who share our exact opinion about what languages would in theory make the industry more productive.

Meanwhile, the enormous sea of industrial engineers are still using Java/C++.

It can end up looking like people debating which particular brand of natural spring water should be given to millions of people who are thirsty in the desert.

I'm not sure I'm saying anything helpful, and I totally understand having a stance on any one of these issues. I'm not accusing anyone of being too focused on these nuances. They are important questions and I'm thankful people way more studied than I am take the time to report their findings on the tradeoffs. But personally, I also try my best to not loose sight of the fact that we are in a giant sea of people who would benefit from exploring virtually any of functional paradigms/languages.

Re: Why OCaml, why now? (2014)

#38

Post by ignoramous »

Unless start-ups or top companies [0] start adopting OCaml, I doubt its rise would be meteoric. Take go-lang, for example. It performs no better than Java on JVM, but is gaining tremendous traction because Google is putting all its weight behind it. I believe C# gets far less credit than it deserves... and MSFT knows exactly what its doing by open sourcing it. I digress. I feel, one is better off investing time in Clojure or Haskell (if functional programming is what one is after), both of which are gaining a lot more traction in the industry and the academia compared to OCaml.

I can speak from what I observed here at Amazon... which did try and make use of Erlang (due to its excellent concurrency model) at one point, but gave up (Simple DB is powered by Erlang, but its successor DynamoDB is JVM based). At least Erlang had its chance... OCaml community within Amazon is non-existent. Whereas Clojure (plenty of traction within due to STM on JVM, I guess) has plenty going for it, as does Nodejs and go-lang. All of these plaforms are popular due to the strong community presence both within the company and at other tech power houses.

I'd also like to point out that the current crop of volunteers behind ocaml.org [1] are doing a really great job of evangelising OCaml.

[0] https://ocaml.org/learn/companies.html and http://clojure.org/Companies and https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_industry

[1] https://ocaml.org/about.html

Re: Why OCaml, why now? (2014)

#39

Post by mercurial »

wyager wrote: post #19

I honestly don't get how people can claim that Haskell is unusually hard to learn. I started learning Haskell with zero functional programming experience, and after getting over that initial pure+functional learning curve (which took two or three weeks of casual learning), it was smooth sailing. Haskell is actually a very simple language compared to popular languages like python or C++; you just have to do a bit of t…

The language itself is not very big. The category-theory based abstractions built on top of it, on the other hand... Just look at the lens library.

Re: Why OCaml, why now? (2014)

#40

Post by amirmc »

ignoramous wrote: post #38

Unless start-ups or top companies [0] start adopting OCaml, I doubt its rise would be meteoric. Take go-lang, for example. It performs no better than Java on JVM, but is gaining tremendous traction because Google is putting all its weight behind it. I believe C# gets far less credit than it deserves... and MSFT knows exactly what its doing by open sourcing it. I digress. I feel, one is better off investing time in Cl…

You mean top companies like, say, Facebook? Or startups like, Esper? I'm not really sure what your comment is trying to say because it comes across as circular ('they're popular because lots of people use them').

Edit: seems you've added the links I was about to point to.

Post reply on HN