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

Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

roc-lang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 180 posts

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#11

Post by jetrink »

drannex wrote: post #6

No real thoughts on the language yet, other than looks interesting and modern. But, that website has one of the smoothest on boarding experience I've ever seen for a new language. From the inline REPL (with built in tutorial), to the code definition section, its insanely practical. Every new (& old) language should have a website and onboarding experience like this one.

I really like that 'fast', 'friendly' and 'functional' all link directly to long, substantive explanations of the goals and decisions related to those qualities.

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#12

Post by yashrk »

tromp wrote: post #10

Does Roc have any features that a Haskell programmer could consider improvements?

First of all — way faster machine code.

Many other things are features or bugs depending of your preferences. For me, for example, eager evaluation is a big improvement, but YMMV.

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#13

Post by satvikpendem »

I don't know, after having used Elm and seeing the community accused of "hostile attacks" by one of the main contributors (who is the creator of Roc now) [0], I don't feel that it's worth my time to put into learning it, even if it is objectively good; I simply cannot know what the creators will do (or refuse to do, in the case of Elm) in the future, especially in a BDFL governance paradigm. This was in fact why I stopped using Elm after a while, it didn't seem like they wanted to ever address the issues they had, or even to acknowledge them as issues in the first place.

I know in my linked [0] that Feldman has since apologized, if only because the comment was being linked to so often [1], but again, why not use any other language where the creators are not so hostile, some even going so far as to say that they "wouldn't trust anything that Richard Feldman was involved in. He was instrumental in making the Elm community a hostile and unwelcoming place."?

[0] https://github.com/gdotdesign/elm-github-install/issues/62#i... (check the edit history)

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#14

Post by otteromkram »

drannex wrote: post #6

No real thoughts on the language yet, other than looks interesting and modern. But, that website has one of the smoothest on boarding experience I've ever seen for a new language. From the inline REPL (with built in tutorial), to the code definition section, its insanely practical. Every new (& old) language should have a website and onboarding experience like this one.

For in-browser tutorials, Haskell does it on the main page, too:

https://www.haskell.org/

For web UI, I always thought QisKit set the bar pretty high. It's intuitive and informative:

https://qiskit.org/

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#17

Post by tromp »

yashrk wrote: post #12
tromp wrote: post #10

Does Roc have any features that a Haskell programmer could consider improvements?

First of all — way faster machine code. Many other things are features or bugs depending of your preferences. For me, for example, eager evaluation is a big improvement, but YMMV.

> eager evaluation is a big improvement

Does it have any support for laziness? E.g. could one define the list of all fibonacci numbers similarly to Haskell's

    fib = let f a b = a : f b (a+b) in f 0 1

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#18

Post by rtfeldman »

satvikpendem wrote: post #13

I don't know, after having used Elm and seeing the community accused of "hostile attacks" by one of the main contributors (who is the creator of Roc now) [0], I don't feel that it's worth my time to put into learning it, even if it is objectively good; I simply cannot know what the creators will do (or refuse to do, in the case of Elm) in the future, especially in a BDFL governance paradigm. This was in fact why I st…

Wow, this is depressing to read. :(

5 years ago I was upset and posted a comment that was unfairly harsh to another commenter. I apologized at the time, and I meant it. I definitely should not have made the harsh comment that I did. It was wrong. There's no excuse for my having written it.

There are a lot of people working on Roc other than me. I'm not even the top committer anymore. [0] I hope you can find it in your heart to give their work some consideration, if not mine.

[0] https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/graphs/contributors

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#20

Post by jgilias »

satvikpendem wrote: post #13

I don't know, after having used Elm and seeing the community accused of "hostile attacks" by one of the main contributors (who is the creator of Roc now) [0], I don't feel that it's worth my time to put into learning it, even if it is objectively good; I simply cannot know what the creators will do (or refuse to do, in the case of Elm) in the future, especially in a BDFL governance paradigm. This was in fact why I st…

I believe people should be given second chances. There’s a good chance that the Elm debacle has taught most people involved a thing or two.
Post reply on HN