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OCaml as my primary language

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Re: OCaml as my primary language

#181

Post by hawk_ »

shpongled wrote: post #154
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.

How do you use Rust without lifetimes?

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#182

Post by orthoxerox »

dmpk2k wrote: post #174
gf000 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time, OCaml has a very simplistic memory layout where even integers are boxed - Java at least has primitive types. That surely has a performance cost.

Are you sure about boxed integers? Perhaps you mean floats? As far as I know Ocaml uses the typical integer/pointer divide.

IIRC it has 31-bit integers, which means you can't natively work with 32-bit data without widening.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#183

Post by fulafel »

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…

Anyone have a link to the Android talk? I wonder if it was backend code or on-device code. On device you could probably justify the compromises of a no-GC language better.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#184

Post by mrkeen »

uncircle wrote: post #178
omcnoe wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue regarding academia is that functional programming is treated as an afterthought/sideshow that is mainly of interest for research. Almost no-one is teaching FP concepts to undergrads.

Before 2010-something, the very popular meme in software engineering was that functional programming is really hard to understand, and really not suited for anything outside of academia. [1] Now that I've been programming in an immutable functional language for almost a decade (Elixir), I'm certain the meme was mostly born out of unfamiliarity [2] than actual complexity; it's really not that much different than imper…

> the very popular meme in software engineering was that functional programming is really hard

> I'm certain the meme was mostly born out of unfamiliarity

> I would go so far as to blame Haskell for the misplaced belief that FP means overcomplicated type theory

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#185

Post by pjmlp »

nine_k wrote: post #158
GhosT078 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Peopl…

There are enough closed source corporate projects to keep 7 vendors in business, selling compilers, in an age developers hardly pay for their tools.

https://www.adacore.com/

https://www.ghs.com/products/ada_optimizing_compilers.html

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/apexada

https://www.ddci.com/products_score/

http://www.irvine.com/tech.html

http://www.ocsystems.com/w/index.php/OCS:PowerAda

http://www.rrsoftware.com/html/prodinf/janus95/j-ada95.htm

Ada was too hardware demanding for the kind of computers people could afford at home, we could already do our Ada-like programming with Modula-2 and Object Pascal dialect hence how Ada lost home computing, and FreePascal/Delphi would be much more used today, had it not been for Borland getting too gready.

On big iron systems, espcially among UNIX vendors they always wanted extra bucks for Ada.

When Sun started the trend of UNIX vendors to charge for the developer tools as an additional SKU, Ada wasn't part of the package, rather an additional license on top, so when you already pay for C and C++ compilers, why would someone pay a few thousand (select currency) more if not required to do so, only because of feeling good writing safer software, back in the days no one cared about development cost of fixing security bugs.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#186

Post by pjmlp »

sureglymop wrote: post #111
hardwaregeek wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t Kotlin be a more reasonable choice in that case? It has ADTs and a lot of the same niceties of Rust.

Yes. It can also be compiled to native. I just think it was held back too much by the java/jvm backwards compatibility but then again that's probably also the justification for its existence. I definitely find it (and jetpack compose) make developing android apps a much better experience than it used to be. What I like a lot about Kotlin are its well written documentation and the trailing lambdas feature. That is def…

Java is castrated on purpose on Android as means to sell Kotlin.

If that wasn't the case, Google would support Java latest with all features, alongside Kotlin, and let the best win.

See how much market update Kotlin has outside Android, when it isn't being pushed and needs to compete against Java vLatest on equal terms.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#187

Post by gylterud »

sshine wrote: post #45
jappgar wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my optimistic take before I started working on a large Haskell code base. Aside from the obvious problem that there's not enough FP in the training corpus, it seems like terser languages don't work all that well with LLMs. My guess is that verbosity actually helps the generation self-correct... if it predicts some "bad" tokens it can pivot more easily and still produce working code.

> terser languages don't work all that well with LLMs I’d believe that, but I haven’t tried enough yet. It seems to be doing quite well with jq. I wonder how its APL fares. When Claude generates Haskell code, I constantly want to reduce it. Doing that is a very mechanical process; I wonder if giving an agent a linter would give better results than overloading it all to the LLM.

I usually treat the LLM generated Haskell code as a first draft.

The power of Haskell in this case is the fearless refactoring the strong type system enables. So even if the code generated is not beautiful, it can sit there and do a job until the surrounding parts have taken shape, and then be refactored into something nice when I have a moment to spare.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#188

Post by sitzkrieg »

nine_k wrote: post #158
GhosT078 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Peopl…

excellent summary of the commercial side, and i personally think the open source tooling with alire got a LOT better. it's definitely worth checking out

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#189

Post by omcnoe »

_mu wrote: post #6

I haven't worked in OCaml but I have worked a bit in F# and found it to be a pleasant experience. One thing I am wondering about in the age of LLMs is if we should all take a harder look at functional languages again. My thought is that if FP languages like OCaml / Haskell / etc. let us compress a lot of information into a small amount of text, then that's better for the context window. Possibly we might be able to p…

I think that functional languages do actually have some advantages when it comes to LLM's, but not due to terseness.

Rather, immutability/purity is a huge advantage because it plays better with the small context window of LLM's. An LLM then doesn't have to worry about side effects or mutable references to data outside the scope currently being considered.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#190

Post by gylterud »

_mu wrote: post #6

I haven't worked in OCaml but I have worked a bit in F# and found it to be a pleasant experience. One thing I am wondering about in the age of LLMs is if we should all take a harder look at functional languages again. My thought is that if FP languages like OCaml / Haskell / etc. let us compress a lot of information into a small amount of text, then that's better for the context window. Possibly we might be able to p…

I have found that Haskell has two good things going for it when it comes to LLM code generation. Both have to do with correctness.

The expressive type system catches a lot of mistakes, and the fact that they are compile errors which can be fed right into the LLM again means that incorrect code is caught early.

The second is property based testing. With it I have had the LLM generate amazingly efficient, correct code, by iteratively making it more and more efficient – running quickcheck on each pass. The LLM is not super good at writing the tests, but if you add some yourself, you quickly root out any mistakes in the generated code.

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