OCaml Programming: Correct and Efficient and Beautiful

Post by camgunz » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 4:39 PM UTC

hedora wrote: post #214

camgunz wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I program primarily in (untyped) Python (which, I get is technically strongly typed but people don't think in technical terms) these days, and I almost never experience type errors. I guess I could attribute this to a couple things: - I'm very specific about when I use None - I'm a big fan of named function arguments - I like to think my naming of things is pretty good, as are my conventions for parameters - I try to…

Python is OK for throwaway code, but I've mostly seen it used for big systems that people (for whatever reason) didn't think were important enough to write in a real language. The people with that opinion don't share your degree of rigor. I usually avoid bugs in python code by rewriting in bash (at 1-10% the size of the original python, since bash's error handling can be set to "always do the right thing" with "set e…

Post by fulafel » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

phyrex wrote: post #223

pharmakom wrote: post #183

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I think the big win is actually immutable data and pure functions. It just so happens that strong typing tends to come along with these things (e.g. Haskell, OCaml)

Clojure is the big outlier

Post by anon_d » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 5:51 PM UTC

kupopuffs wrote: post #159

muglug wrote: post #27

I found my experience trying to work with a large OCaml base a nightmare — when signatures changed in an unstable dependency (e.g. function argument removed and nested inside another), the errors spat out by the typechecker were utterly incomphrehensible. This was largely due to automatic currying in OCaml — if I have a function call "some_function arg1 arg2" and "some_function" adds a third argument, that call becom…

Forgive my ignorance, I'd would like an example of the "functional" (hehe) benefits of automatic currying

Post by renox » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 8:57 PM UTC

ahmedalsudani wrote: post #152

muglug wrote: post #112

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I used StandardML at university in the early 2000s, and I appreciate that OCaml is an older language that heavily influenced the design of Rust. Given that history, it’s instructive to note the sorts of things (like auto-currying) that Rust did not inherit.

Rust is a different language with a different audience. If a functional language is presented today that does not automatically curry calls, I have no interest. Just because the tool does not work for you does not mean there's a defect in the design.

Post by yawaramin » Sun, Jun 26, 2022, 12:22 AM UTC

wyager wrote: post #218

yawaramin wrote: post #195

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> BP is PP plus what's required to make it more than a toy And in fact OCaml does have BP, as was explained earlier, just with a heavier syntax. > effective inability to use point-free style OK but point-free style is not an end in itself, it's just a means to an end (clean code), and there's certainly no universal agreement that it's the best means...explicit style is almost always easier to understand for a wide as…

> just with a heavier syntax. Ok, I'm glad we agree on that. > I can see how writing Eta reduction is one example, but a great deal of code is cleanly expressed as e.g. vecLen = sum . map (^2) And ocaml's type system is not capable of handling this gracefully. Very unfortunate!

    let vec_len vec = vec |> map (fun x -> x ** 2.) |> sum

    let square x = x ** 2.
    let vec_len vec = vec |> map square |> sum