151–160 of 313 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd rather have that issue than seeing "AI" plastered all over the place. I'm of the opinion AI should be reserved for artificial general intelligence. These things aren't intelligent yet. They're just em-bloat-ified traditional machine learning techniques. Not that they're useless. I just hate the terminology. If people start using the term AI, we better be living in I, Robot. Not whatever the hell this is. Tangenti…
I also think AK would fit better.
> Fast compile times > Fewer abstractions, and an easy to understand runtime > Strong static guarantees > Functional programming constructs. Especially pattern matching and sum types. > Good performance > Good documentation I feel this is also Elm!
Hashtbl.add table key value
Precedence, nominal inheritance, HKTs, incoherent typeclasses make Scala much less aesthetically pleasant but much more productive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would suggest that people interested in using OCaml on Windows (or indeed, OCaml at all) try F# instead. It is still an ML-family language. Incidentally, by targeting the CLR, F# is considerably more deployable (both to users and to developers) than OCaml is. Plus, any old NuGet library written in C# or VB.NET can be used almost trivially in F#. This also solves the problem OP listed about a tiny ecosystem, because…
I find F# nowhere near as good as OCaml and think this comparison is ugly, but if I was forced to use a .NET platform I would almost certainly use F#
I've dabbled in F# (and aside from the rough setup with little coherent information at the time) had a pretty good time. Actor-based concurrency was easy to grok. The one gotcha was whenever those mutable Arrays entered the picture. I'd like to hear some practical reasons for preferring OCaml over F#. [Hoping I don't get a lot about MS & .NET which are valid concerns but not what I'm curious about.] I want to know mo…
It's a matter of trends: F# is losing compatibility with the overall CLR ecosystem due to the churn in C# features with poor F# interop, but F# has already mingled its design with the CLR's, too much to live on its own as a native language. Plus its compiler is slow and the tooling is getting increasingly unstable. Meanwhile, OCaml got rid of its global lock, got a really fast-compiling native toolchain with stable a…
If a language makes "unboxed types" a feature, a specific distinction, and has to sell "removing global lock" as something that is a massive breakthrough and not table stakes from 1.0, it can't possibly be compared to F# in favourable light.
> why isn’t OCaml more popular I've used OCaml a bit and found various issues with it: * Terrible Windows support. With OCaml 5 it's upgraded to "pretty bad". * The syntax is hard to parse for humans. Often it turns into a word soup, without any helpful punctuation to tell you what things are. It's like reading a book with no paragraphs, capitalisation or punctuation. * The syntax isn't recoverable. Sometimes you can…
I wish I could make a list like this about rust in this place and not be flagged.
* Compile time is only ok. On par with C++.
* Async has a surprisingly number of footguns and ergonomic issues.
* There's no good solution to self-borrowing or partial borrows.
* While using macros is fine, writing them is pretty awful. Fortunately you rarely need to do that. Relatedly it is missing introspection support.
* Sometimes the types and lifetimes get very complex.
But overall I still much prefer it to OCaml. The syntax is much nicer, it's easier to read, the ecosystem and tooling are much better, the documentation is much better, and it actively hates linked lists!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is this alleged friction? Because plenty of people have been shipping great projects in Ocaml since it was released so it doesn’t seem to be much of an issue to many. I doubt Ocaml will be surpassed soon. They just added an effect system to the multicore rewrite so all things being considered, they seem to be pulling even more ahead.
> Because plenty of people have been shipping great projects in Ocaml What applications are written in OCaml? All I can think of (which says more about me than it does about OCaml) is the original Rust compiler. Even Haskell has Pandoc and Xmonad.
Generally, you want stuff where you have to build a fairly large core from scratch. Most programs out there doesn't really fit that too well nowadays. We tend to glue things more than write from nothing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having loops is not the defining feature that separates functional from imperative. Where did this idea come from? I'm suddenly seeing it in a lot of places.
It is not the defining feature but loss of the loop is one of the most obvious differences for people who look at a functional language Rust has immutability, pattern matching, etc, but it remains an imperative language with "some functional features". Or this is my subjective analysis.
You'd be right.
"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. – Rob Pike 1"
"It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical. – Rob Pike 2"
Talking as someone who wrote OCaml at work for a while, the benefits of functional programming and the type guarantees that it's ilk provides cannot be understated; you only start to reach them, however, once most developers have shifted their way of thinking rather extremely, which is a time cost that that designers of Go did not want new Googlers to pay.