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OCaml as my primary language

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Re: OCaml as my primary language

#151

Post by DrewADesign »

gerdesj wrote: post #137
noelwelsh wrote: post #33

I saw a talk by someone from Google about their experiences using Rust in the Android team. Two points stuck out: they migrated many projects from Python, so performance can't have been that much of a concern, and in their surveys the features people liked most were basics like pattern matching and ADTs. My conclusion is that for a lot of tasks the benefit from Rust came from ML cicra 1990, not lifetimes etc. I feel…

"I feel if OCaml had got its act together ..." The great thing is we have choice. We have a huge number of ways to express ideas and ... do them! I might draw a parallel with the number of spoken languages extent in the UK (only ~65M people). You are probably familiar with English. There are rather a lot more languages here. Irish, Scottish, Welsh - these are the thriving Brythonic languages (and they probably have s…

For personal projects? Sure. In nearly any development organization larger than one person, unilaterally deciding to use OCAML instead of what everybody else uses would go over about as well as unilaterally deciding to use Aramaic at meetings.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#152

Post by acjohnson55 »

sigzero wrote: post #80
unstruktured wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely no reason to use double semicolons in practice. The only place you really should see it is when using the repl.

Yeah, it makes me think he doesn't understand them in OCaml.

I worked in OCaml for a year and I couldn't tell you by memory what the difference was. I remember being very annoyed by OCaml's many language quirks.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#153

Post by voidhorse »

noelwelsh wrote: post #54
garbthetill wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

doesnt rust still have the advantage of having no gc? I dont like writing rust, but the selling point of being able to write performative code with memory safety guarantees has always stuck with me

I think "no gc but memory safe" is what originally got people excited about Rust. It's a genuinely new capability in production ready languages. However, I think Rust is used in many contexts where a GC is just fine and working with lifetimes makes many programs more painful to write. I think for many programs the approach taken by Oxidized OCaml[1] or Scala[2] gives 80% of the benefit while being a lot more ergonomi…

Spot on. It's also fascinating to watch people have their minds blown in 2020+ by basic features that have been around since the nineties. It's kind of sad, actually. The industry would be in such a better place than it is today if so many programmers weren't allergic to all things academic and "theoretical" and were more curious and technical than they were conceited. It's baffling that computing, literally a subject area in which the theory quite literally is the practice, is so full of people who refuse to engage with theoretical work and research.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#154

Post by shpongled »

noelwelsh wrote: post #33

I saw a talk by someone from Google about their experiences using Rust in the Android team. Two points stuck out: they migrated many projects from Python, so performance can't have been that much of a concern, and in their surveys the features people liked most were basics like pattern matching and ADTs. My conclusion is that for a lot of tasks the benefit from Rust came from ML cicra 1990, not lifetimes etc. I feel…

As someone who loves SML/OCaml and has written primarily Rust over the past ~10 years, I totally agree - I use it as a modern and ergonomic ML with best-in-class tooling, libraries, and performance. Lifetimes are cool, and I use them when needed, but they aren't the reason I use Rust at all. I would use Rust with a GC instead of lifetimes too.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#155

Post by voidhorse »

ackfoobar wrote: post #5

> Sum types: For example, Kotlin and Java (and de facto C#) use a construct associated with inheritance relations called sealing. This has the benefit of giving you the ability to refer to a case as its own type. > the expression of sums verbose and, in my view, harder to reason about. You declare the sum type once, and use it many times. Slightly more verbose sum type declaration is worth it when it makes using the…

I'm not sure why people are debating the merits of sum types versus sealed types in response to this. I prefer functional languages myself, but you are entirely correct that sealed types can fully model sum types and that the type level discrimination you get for free via subtyping makes them slightly easier to define and work with than sum types reliant on polymorphism.

Operationally these systems and philosophies are quite different, but mathematically we are all working in more work less an equivalent category and all the type system shenanigans you have in FP are possible in OOP modulo explicit limits placed on the language and vice versa.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#156

Post by owlstuffing »

whimsicalism wrote: post #128
munificent wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel if OCaml had got its act together around about 2010 with multicore and a few other annoyances[1] it could have been Rust. Arguably, that could have been Scala and for a while it seemed like it would be Scala but then it kind of just... didn't. I suspect some of that was that the programming style of some high profile Scala packages really alienated people by pushing the type system and operator overloading m…

Scala was always going to be hamstrung by the fact that it's a JVM language and yes, the crazy stuff people did with the language didn't help.

I agree w that, but I think Scala has deeper problems.

It tries to be a better Java and a better OCaml at the same time. This split personality led to Scala’s many dialects, which made it notorious for being difficult to read and reason about, particularly as a mainstream language contender.

Above all, Scala is considered a functional language with imperative OOP qualities. And it more or less fits that description. But like it or not primarily functional languages don’t have a strong reputation for building large maintainable enterprise software.

That’s the quiet part no one says out loud.

It’s like how in academic circles Lisp is considered the most pure and most powerful of programming languages, which may be true. At the same time most real-world decision makers see it as unsuitable as a mainstream language. If it were otherwise, we’d have seen a Lisp contend with imperative langs such as Java, C#, TypeScript, etc.

I’ve always attributed this disconnect to the fact that people naturally model the world around them as objects with state — people don’t think functionally.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#157

Post by ackfoobar »

voidhorse wrote: post #155
ackfoobar wrote: post #5

> Sum types: For example, Kotlin and Java (and de facto C#) use a construct associated with inheritance relations called sealing. This has the benefit of giving you the ability to refer to a case as its own type. > the expression of sums verbose and, in my view, harder to reason about. You declare the sum type once, and use it many times. Slightly more verbose sum type declaration is worth it when it makes using the…

I'm not sure why people are debating the merits of sum types versus sealed types in response to this. I prefer functional languages myself, but you are entirely correct that sealed types can fully model sum types and that the type level discrimination you get for free via subtyping makes them slightly easier to define and work with than sum types reliant on polymorphism. Operationally these systems and philosophies a…

> I'm not sure why

Me neither.

> you are entirely correct that sealed types can fully model sum types

I want to be wrong, in that case I learn something new.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#158

Post by nine_k »

GhosT078 wrote: post #150
nine_k wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that Google strives to have a reasonably short list of languages approved for production-touching code. Rust can replace / complement C++, while OCaml cannot (it could replace Go instead... fat chance!). So I suspect that the team picked Rust because it was the only blessed language with ADTs, not because they won't like something with faster compile times. No way OCaml could have stolen the Rust's thunder: w…

In 2010, Ada 2005 was the most bare-metal-worthy expressive language. Now that would be Ada 2022.

While at it: what was / is holding Ada back? I haven't seen a single open-source project built in Ada, nor did I hear about any closed-source corporate project that uses Ada's superpowers. (Most likely these exist! But I did not see any available, or at least well-publicized.)

People agree to go to great lengths to use a tool that has some kind of superpower, despite syntactic weirdness or tooling deficiencies. People study and use LISP descendants like Clojure, APL descendants like K, "academic" languages like Haskell and OCaml, they write hobby projects in niche languages like Nim or Odin, they even use even C++ templates.

Why is Ada so under-represented? It must have a very mature ecosystem. I suspect that it's just closed-source mostly, and the parties involved don't see much value in opening up. If so, Ada is never going to make it big, and will slowly retreat under the pressure of better-known open alternatives, even in entrenched areas like aerospace.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#159

Post by yawaramin »

whimsicalism wrote: post #129
yodsanklai wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> aesthetically the double semicolons are an abomination and irk me far more. I think they have been optional for like 20 years, except in the top-level interactive environment to force execution. That being said, I still don't get why people are so much upset with the syntax. You'll integrate it after a week writing OCaml code.

I spent more than a week writing ocaml and still found the syntax pretty annoying. ReasonML would have been nice if the Ocaml community actually cared, but they are a bit insular.

Reason syntax is fully supported by the OCaml ecosystem and has been for many years.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#160

Post by rtpg »

noelwelsh wrote: post #33

I saw a talk by someone from Google about their experiences using Rust in the Android team. Two points stuck out: they migrated many projects from Python, so performance can't have been that much of a concern, and in their surveys the features people liked most were basics like pattern matching and ADTs. My conclusion is that for a lot of tasks the benefit from Rust came from ML cicra 1990, not lifetimes etc. I feel…

I think people like ADTs and pattern matching that Rust gives, but really the way that Rust becomes even more pleasant is that you have _so many_ trait methods on standard library objects that offer succinct answers to common patterns.

Haskell of course has some of this, but immutability means that Haskell doesn't have to have answers for lots of things. And you want pattern matching as your basic building block, but at the end of the day most of your code won't have pattern matching and will instead rely on higher level patterns (that can build off of ADTs providing some degree of certainty on totality etc)

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