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The road to OCaml 5.0

discuss.ocaml.org

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Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#21

Post by mtoner23 »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #2

I run a hedge fund. On any given day I hear a large number of complaints from the technologists that complex python systems are difficult to look after and we should use something else instead. There's some Rust being used, but there's little chance to get a quant to use Rust to do research because research is an exploratory process and the last thing one wants is a language that requires a lot of thought about lifet…

Its not the language its the people, instagram is almost entirely run on python, if they can so can you. https://instagram-engineering.com/tagged/python

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#22

Post by carlmr »

typon wrote: post #20
hajile wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your language doesn't worry about lifetimes, they don't go away. It just means you have to worry about them yourself instead. Sometimes that is great. Other times, that will be very hard and error-prone.

An extremely simple thing like having two objects stored in a struct where one object has a reference to the other is a Herculean task in Rust. This is not a language designed for prototyping...

You can easily avoid such constructs in most cases though.

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#23

Post by typon »

carlmr wrote: post #22
typon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An extremely simple thing like having two objects stored in a struct where one object has a reference to the other is a Herculean task in Rust. This is not a language designed for prototyping...

You can easily avoid such constructs in most cases though.

I've allocated both these things on the heap and Rust simply won't let me store them both together. I don't know about you but this is an extremely common pattern in almost all languages, you just don't think about it in the gc languages and in C++ storing pointers is no issue. The popularity of crates like rental also shows that it's not as easily avoidable as you suggest.

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#24

Post by awild »

pharmakom wrote: post #12
bhy wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python type checking (type annotation, mypy) should at least partially solve the problem of maintaining complex Python systems. Though it doesn't help with performance.

The larger problem in my view is that big Python systems tend to follow OOP design since functional programming patterns do not work well in Python. So you start with something minimal and simple inside a script or notebook, but quickly it evolves into something more like a Java code-base. Typing does help, agreed.

Java has good to great FP, making most objects immutable is also trivial. Mypy is good to get strict typing enforced but, but I still prefer the native and slightly wonky typesystem to a tacked on one that builds on trust.

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#25

Post by lgessler »

nerdponx wrote: post #17
short_sells_poo wrote: post #2

I run a hedge fund. On any given day I hear a large number of complaints from the technologists that complex python systems are difficult to look after and we should use something else instead. There's some Rust being used, but there's little chance to get a quant to use Rust to do research because research is an exploratory process and the last thing one wants is a language that requires a lot of thought about lifet…

Have you looked into Julia, Nim, Clojure, or even Common Lisp? I'm not sure bout Python interop with CL, but Nim and Clojure seems to have some kind of beta-grade interop, and there's a solid interop story in Julia. And all of those languages have some of their own "native" data analysis and scientific computing toolkits (Julia having more than "some", of course). That said, complicated Python systems can be improved…

Link to the interop lib for Clojure you're referring to for people who don't know it: https://github.com/clj-python/libpython-clj

Really a remarkable feat of engineering. Here's its author giving a talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQPW16_jixs

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#26

Post by typon »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #2

I run a hedge fund. On any given day I hear a large number of complaints from the technologists that complex python systems are difficult to look after and we should use something else instead. There's some Rust being used, but there's little chance to get a quant to use Rust to do research because research is an exploratory process and the last thing one wants is a language that requires a lot of thought about lifet…

I would write principled Python with strict coding standards. Make type annotations mandatory and turn up pylint or flake8 to maximum warnings. It really helps avoid a bunch of silly mistakes, while still providing a way out for doing crazy stuff that Python is good at.

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#28

Post by nv-vn »

mtoner23 wrote: post #21
short_sells_poo wrote: post #2

I run a hedge fund. On any given day I hear a large number of complaints from the technologists that complex python systems are difficult to look after and we should use something else instead. There's some Rust being used, but there's little chance to get a quant to use Rust to do research because research is an exploratory process and the last thing one wants is a language that requires a lot of thought about lifet…

Its not the language its the people, instagram is almost entirely run on python, if they can so can you. https://instagram-engineering.com/tagged/python

This is a terribly misinformed take. If you throw enough resources at Python then sure, you can probably get adequate throughput. The problem is that in finance a lot of problems require you to think about latency, which is a total non-starter for Python

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#29

Post by cardanome »

I really hope to see more interest in OCaml in the future.

It is probably one of the most underrated programming languages. The perfect marriage between state of the art functional programming and pragmatism. A great static and strong type system. Solid performance and an insanely fast compiler. Also compiles to JS if you need that.

Multicore support will make it quite perfect. Only thing that is holding it back more than that and the reason I have not done many projects with it, is it weirdly fragmented ecosystem.

Having to decide which standard library to use is a pain but you can cope with that. Tooling is getting there but stuff like automatic code formatting solutions are still pretty immature (and have really weird defaults).

Frontend there is that ReasonML/Reason/ReScript thing that Facebook it trying to do. It offers an alternative syntax but nearly nobody uses it because they changed the name and I think also the syntax three times already. So it is all a mess.

Don't let that stop you though. There are some pretty solid mature libraries in OCaml and if need be interop story with C and other languages is solid.

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#30

Post by mtoner23 »

nv-vn wrote: post #28
mtoner23 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not the language its the people, instagram is almost entirely run on python, if they can so can you. https://instagram-engineering.com/tagged/python

This is a terribly misinformed take. If you throw enough resources at Python then sure, you can probably get adequate throughput . The problem is that in finance a lot of problems require you to think about latency , which is a total non-starter for Python

If it were a total non starter than why would their entire company be using it?
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