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Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

roc-lang.org

31–40 of 180 posts

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#31

I don't know, after having used Elm and seeing the community accused of "hostile attacks" by one of the main contributors (who is the creator of Roc now) [0], I don't feel that it's worth my time to put into learning it, even if it is objectively good; I simply cannot know what the creators will do (or refuse to do, in the case of Elm) in the future, especially in a BDFL governance paradigm. This was in fact why I st…

Maybe I'm not understanding something, but I would use a programming language I liked even if one of the main contributors was the worst human on earth.

I don't understand why people have to make technical stuff personal.

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#32
post #9

If you are interested, «why yet another programming language?». The unique selling point of Roc is clever optimization to convert purely functional source code to deep-imperative fast machine code, while keeping all the correctness of functional algorithms. See this video of Richard Feldman for details — «Outperforming Imperative with Pure Functional Languages»: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzfy4EKwG_Y Among those…

I’d say that’s one of a few unique selling points. Some others I noticed:

- side effects are strictly relegated to async effects, eg all I/O calls return a future

- declarative static loading as imports

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#33
post #16
post #10

Does Roc have any features that a Haskell programmer could consider improvements?

Not really, no. Like Elm, it strips away practically everything that wasn't already in 1970s-era ML. It's much closer to a trimmed-down Ocaml than it is to Haskell.

Some in the ML community think a simpler language has advantages over a more expressive one, in some cases.

For example: https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-suggestions/issues/243#issu...

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#34
post #10

Does Roc have any features that a Haskell programmer could consider improvements?

Convenience instead of historical baggage, maybe?

All languages have some amount of historical baggage, but I'm not sure what you're referring to here.

If anything, Haskell gets a lot of eyerolls for its slow moving pace and for trying to build a language from mathematical first principles.

It's not perfect (eg.: Monad was not designed to be a special case of Applicative in the beginning, I believe) but it's better at "avoiding baggage" than many other languages I know of.

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#35
post #24
post #7

Big fan of Richard Feldman's talks and Roc is one of my most anticipated upcoming language besides Gleam. Great to see that there's now a nice Roc website. Looking forward to how the language evolves!

I know Koka is more of a research project than anything else, but I think it’s by far the most interesting. Moving to effect handlers, the Perseus ARC algorithm, and identifying “functional-but-in-place” algorithms all feel like game changers.

Yes, Koka is evidently a inspiration for Roc, which uses Perceus, in-place mutation and their effect system is called "abilities". Roc aims to be something like the "practical version" of Koka('s ideas).

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what was so harsh? I checked the edit history, I saw the original comments and subsequent minor tweaks. His response was rather testy and stubborn (as is the case with the Elm team generally, it seems), but not as much of a dick comment as I have seen elsewhere in GitHub issues.

There is some more context here: https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/#forka... > Threatening a person with exclusion from a community for attempting to patch the source code is quite antithetical to the spirit of Open Source, as far as I can see.

I appreciate the context because it sheds further light on a big problem with Elm the project, but that context doesn't change what he said, which simply wasn't that harsh or mean. Like, from your original comment, I expected some kind of personal attack on the other person lol

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what was so harsh? I checked the edit history, I saw the original comments and subsequent minor tweaks. His response was rather testy and stubborn (as is the case with the Elm team generally, it seems), but not as much of a dick comment as I have seen elsewhere in GitHub issues.

There is some more context here: https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/#forka... > Threatening a person with exclusion from a community for attempting to patch the source code is quite antithetical to the spirit of Open Source, as far as I can see.

There's no evidence thus far in the Roc community thats it's anything like ELM's community.

Seems like the Author of Roc is cool now, that was 5 years ago and hasn't done the thing you fear he might do? people get testy, say things they regret.

I understand trust is earned, but it's been 5 years. and the Roc community thus far have been really nice, welcoming and collaborative. I get Elixir and Ruby community vibes from these contributors.

Pick your battles I guess?

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what was so harsh? I checked the edit history, I saw the original comments and subsequent minor tweaks. His response was rather testy and stubborn (as is the case with the Elm team generally, it seems), but not as much of a dick comment as I have seen elsewhere in GitHub issues.

There is some more context here: https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/#forka... > Threatening a person with exclusion from a community for attempting to patch the source code is quite antithetical to the spirit of Open Source, as far as I can see.

From this post it feels like they never even understood the original comment about going against the project’s goals. The drama created around this is much, much larger than the issue warranted. If Roc keeps this audience away, maybe that is good thing.

Note that they were never prevented from forking the project (how would you even do that), instead they chose to try and stronghand the project into accepting their view, which is also not healthy for OSS. Maybe their Elm fork would be mainstream by now if it really catered to developers’ needs.

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#40
post #6

No real thoughts on the language yet, other than looks interesting and modern. But, that website has one of the smoothest on boarding experience I've ever seen for a new language. From the inline REPL (with built in tutorial), to the code definition section, its insanely practical. Every new (& old) language should have a website and onboarding experience like this one.

No kidding. It went from the most barebones "Under Construction, check back later" website possible to one of the best proglang homepages I've ever seen.
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