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Reason: A new interface to OCaml

facebook.github.io

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Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#141

Post by jordwalke »

evincarofautumn wrote: post #107
jordwalke wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See the FAQ, as this is a fairly anticipated question. There's some benefits to having some token to separate let bindings and statements, so that the grammar is unambiguous, and it doesn't matter too much which token is used (monkey emoji anyone?) However, I think it may be possible to eliminate delimiters altogether eventually. Because we have the `refmt` program which can convert and beautify between two arbitrary…

It would be good to look at the F# spec for a description of their existing indentation & semicolon elision rules. In practice I’ve found them nice to work with, although they sometimes require excessive indentation.

Thanks evincarofautumn! I'll take a look.

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#143

Post by devit »

It seems to me that Rust would be pretty much strictly better than this.

In particular Rust has similar syntax, seems to have all Reason's features plus the linear types and regions/borrowing that allow memory and concurrency safety while still being able to mutate memory and not being forced to use GC.

They are aware of Rust since they cite it in their page, so I wonder why they decided to create this instead of using Rust.

It would be nice if they explained this in the FAQ.

I guess it might be useful if you have an OCaml codebase to interface with but don't already know OCaml, but given the relative obscurity of OCaml that seems a pretty narrow use (and also Facebook isn't known to make extensive use of it, afaik).

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#146

Post by mhd »

I hope this doesn't sound like trolling, but JavaScript's syntax is now a selling point? I kinda-sorta get the reason why people want an actual JavaScript stack on the backend, but I never heard that syntax/semantics brought people from e.g. Rails to Node.

Sure, OCaml isn't even the nicest syntax in the ML family, but I'm not sure whether that's worth it, especially considering that almost any "X-like" language often turns out to be an Uncanny Valley for "X" programmers -- close enough to make some frustrating errors.

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#147

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

devit wrote: post #143

It seems to me that Rust would be pretty much strictly better than this. In particular Rust has similar syntax, seems to have all Reason's features plus the linear types and regions/borrowing that allow memory and concurrency safety while still being able to mutate memory and not being forced to use GC. They are aware of Rust since they cite it in their page, so I wonder why they decided to create this instead of usi…

Rust lacks a REPL right?

REPL is quite nice for programmer productivity.

Re: Reason: A new interface to OCaml

#149

Post by [deleted] »

devit wrote: post #143

It seems to me that Rust would be pretty much strictly better than this. In particular Rust has similar syntax, seems to have all Reason's features plus the linear types and regions/borrowing that allow memory and concurrency safety while still being able to mutate memory and not being forced to use GC. They are aware of Rust since they cite it in their page, so I wonder why they decided to create this instead of usi…

[deleted]
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