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Motivation – Keli Language

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Re: Motivation – Keli Language

#32

The author lists Ocaml as "non-IDE-friendly." This is not my experience. Ocaml is one of the most IDE friendly languages I have in my toolkit right now -- not just functional languages, but all of them. Ocaml + Emacs + Merlin is stable, accurate, very fast (responsive), and easy to set up and configure. Plus, named and named-optional parameters are supported in the language, and can be used to good effect for disambi…

Compare that to JavaScript where you can literally just install vscode and node and you’re up and running. Not to mention that you could pop open a console in any browser and execute code.

I love OCaml as a language but we have to admit that the developer experience just sucks.

For something to be simple, a 10 year old kid needs to be able to figure it out. That’s how languages get adopted.

Re: Motivation – Keli Language

#33

The author lists Ocaml as "non-IDE-friendly." This is not my experience. Ocaml is one of the most IDE friendly languages I have in my toolkit right now -- not just functional languages, but all of them. Ocaml + Emacs + Merlin is stable, accurate, very fast (responsive), and easy to set up and configure. Plus, named and named-optional parameters are supported in the language, and can be used to good effect for disambi…

Also F# has amazing IDE support with Ionide in VSCode.

Re: Motivation – Keli Language

#34
I think it's great that Keli is designed with IDE support in mind. However I believe that this is only half of the reason why FP still doesn't really break through in the corporate world.

The other reason is that many FP users are too enthusiastic about creating abstractions. This is of course something that FP is exceptionally well suited for. An api that was written to simply process a list of Orders into a Report might be abstracted into a fold on some monad, which at first seems a great idea. But if you're not careful, readability suffers a lot. It's much easier to get to know an application when its code deals with business objects that you already understand well, than to read hundreds of lines of code that deal only with abstractions.

Maybe there should be a new edition of Clean Code written specifically for FP, to address this anti pattern.

By the way this problem is not unique for FP, OOP suffered the same problem in the past. But the OOP community learned from its mistakes and now most developers know to 'prefer composition over inheritance', for instance.

Re: Motivation – Keli Language

#35
post #18

Anyone else irked by the use of "Intellisense" - a Microsoft brand - when "autocomplete" will do?

Seems like they're complaining (for lack of a better word) about only having word autocomplete available for most functional languages versus a more refined suggestion tool like Intellisense. But yeah, they don't get that specific about that fact. I guess Intellisense has entered the realm of Kleenex in how it's used.

Re: Motivation – Keli Language

#36
post #32

The author lists Ocaml as "non-IDE-friendly." This is not my experience. Ocaml is one of the most IDE friendly languages I have in my toolkit right now -- not just functional languages, but all of them. Ocaml + Emacs + Merlin is stable, accurate, very fast (responsive), and easy to set up and configure. Plus, named and named-optional parameters are supported in the language, and can be used to good effect for disambi…

Compare that to JavaScript where you can literally just install vscode and node and you’re up and running. Not to mention that you could pop open a console in any browser and execute code. I love OCaml as a language but we have to admit that the developer experience just sucks. For something to be simple, a 10 year old kid needs to be able to figure it out. That’s how languages get adopted.

>Compare that to JavaScript where you can literally just install vscode and node and you’re up and running. Not to mention that you could pop open a console in any browser and execute code.

That's only because VSCode was developed in JavaScript, and JavaScript is used in Browsers anyway. This has nothing to do with Intellisense friendliness.

Re: Motivation – Keli Language

#37
post #27

Elm single handedly got me into functional programming. Everything from the syntax to the standard library. I haven’t used a language that was that elegant and delightful to use perhaps since I discovered Ruby. It makes me really sad that Elm turned to this niche language/framework that it is today. I had hoped for it to grow someday to have a mobile target in addition to web, to be able to use it on the server, hell…

I also love Elm, but the fact that it is a niche language now doesn't mean it's all it ever will be. There's nothing really stopping anyone from adapting Elm to the server for example, but the reason it hasn't been done yet is because it's best to focus on solving one problem at a time. If Evan just translated the Node standard api 1:1 for example, it wouldn't be Elm or Node and there would be no reason to use it.

Re: Motivation – Keli Language

#38
post #27

Elm single handedly got me into functional programming. Everything from the syntax to the standard library. I haven’t used a language that was that elegant and delightful to use perhaps since I discovered Ruby. It makes me really sad that Elm turned to this niche language/framework that it is today. I had hoped for it to grow someday to have a mobile target in addition to web, to be able to use it on the server, hell…

Looks beautiful. Love functional languages (Elixir, Scala). Python is my day-to-day language. Gets the job done. But it‘s not my biggest passion to program in it. Too many inconsistencies for my taste.

Re: Motivation – Keli Language

#39
post #18

Anyone else irked by the use of "Intellisense" - a Microsoft brand - when "autocomplete" will do?

Code completion (autocomplete) is a subset of intellisense. Intellisense also provides e.g. info tooltips on hover and more.

But yes, I agree since the author specifically talks about the way OO languages provide a more easily autocompleted syntax and parameter help doesn't really differ, perhaps the better term to use here would be autocomplete or code completion.

Re: Motivation – Keli Language

#40

You can achieve this style with Ruby and keyword arguments, no new language required.

And you can emulate most of C++ in C with macros. Doesn't mean you should.

false equivalence, there is no "emulation" of features they are native to the language
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