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The Flix Programming Language

flix.dev

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Re: The Flix Programming Language

#31

Post by bradrn »

usrbinbash wrote: post #23
globalnode wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i do, does functional programming make this a non issue? maybe im just not smart enough to wrap my head around it.

Yes and no. In theory, writing in a functional language that allows only "pure" functions (aka. functions w.o. side effects), makes it easier to control state. In practice, side effects exists and are required for programs to do anything useful. In my opinion, one mistake of many purely functional languages was to be so focused on this purity, that it made it needlessly hard to write useful code in them, especially f…

> FP could probably have had a lot more success if it didn't clamour on about pure functions so much

Note that there are many functional languages which don’t care about purity at all: for instance, Scheme, OCaml, SML and Elixir. I get annoyed when people confuse Haskell for the broader paradigm of functional programming. (Even though Haskell is my main programming language!)

Re: The Flix Programming Language

#32

Post by brigandish »

subarctic wrote: post #13

Lots of interesting bits in the FAQ: https://flix.dev/faq/ Particularly in the sections titled "What features are not supported" (no exceptions or panics, so e.g. indexing has to return an Option in case it's out of bounds) and "What controversial design choices are made". Some pithy remarks towards the end as well. To follow HN tradition and find the most controversial topic to discuss, my guess is it's either not a…

I also don't like "Unused definitions, type declarations, etc. are compile-time errors" as I often want to test the validity of a statement, like a type declaration, by compiling before using it. Much prefer warnings.

I don't mind the disallowing name shadowing, but I really, really hate (I mean that) websites that are just good ol' text and the odd picture that require Javascript. The excuse of "we used React, it's easy" seems odd given that HTML is much easier.

Re: The Flix Programming Language

#34

Post by usrbinbash »

ReleaseCandidat wrote: post #30
usrbinbash wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. In theory, writing in a functional language that allows only "pure" functions (aka. functions w.o. side effects), makes it easier to control state. In practice, side effects exists and are required for programs to do anything useful. In my opinion, one mistake of many purely functional languages was to be so focused on this purity, that it made it needlessly hard to write useful code in them, especially f…

> The irony is, that FP could probably have had a lot more success if it didn't clamour on about pure functions so much Except functional languages like Lisps and the MLs never were pure, the only (used by a significant number of people) has been Miranda/Haskell (ignoring Coq and the other proof assistents). Or, to put it in other words: ML (no, not that ML) turned 50 this year, Scheme is oder than 50 too and Miranda…

Yes, there have. And not a single one of them was able to even gain a sizeable fraction of the mindspace that imperative languages have, let alone replace or obsolete even a single one of them.

So maybe it's time for FP as a whole to accept the fact, that there seems to be something fundamental about the way it's paraded implementations look and feel like, that puts off a lot of programmers.

Maybe it's time for FP to accept that the paradigm as a whole has a lot to contribute that is useful to everyone, but doesn't need a new language with largely different syntactic constructs to do so.

Re: The Flix Programming Language

#35

Post by fuzztester »

rscho wrote: post #29
thefourthchime wrote: post #24

In today's world, i think that English is the only programming language that people should focus on. With the rapid rise of AI, most tasks will soon involve the management of AI models rather than writing code. However, it is still important to have a basic understanding of coding. Introducing a new programming language at this point seems silly to me.

Security-critical tasks and programming language research will involve humans coding for the foreseeable future. I don't think you'd like your surgical robot to be programmed in English.

Yes, because English is a cut-put language. So instead of cutting some organ (open) (to treat it), the robot might put it in the dustbin instead, due to a speech recognition bug.

;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38157851

Re: The Flix Programming Language

#36

Post by Kwpolska »

thefourthchime wrote: post #24

In today's world, i think that English is the only programming language that people should focus on. With the rapid rise of AI, most tasks will soon involve the management of AI models rather than writing code. However, it is still important to have a basic understanding of coding. Introducing a new programming language at this point seems silly to me.

Lol. The random bullshit generators can write basic code, or make auto-complete smarter, but good luck making one solve complex problems, solve obscure problems without generating bullshit (aka hallucinations) or reason about large codebases. Random bullshit generators see far too much hype and will never replace programming languages for most things, where determinism is needed.

Re: The Flix Programming Language

#37

Post by brabel »

usrbinbash wrote: post #20
globalnode wrote: post #6

do functional languages mainly appeal to computer language enthusiasts/researchers? im just not seeing the benefit personally.

Functional Programming was, for a long time, talked about as yet-another-solution to solve the issue of complexity in larger codebases, primarily the complexity of controlling state getting out o hand. Similar to OOP, which promised to do this by encapsulating state, FP promised to do this via purity, aka. getting rid of as much state as possible, and only allowing stateful transition at certain well defined sections…

> OOP simply came first

Not really. Lisp is a functional programming language and has existed since at least 1960. Some claim there were many other proto-functional languages since the early 60's, and the FP language [1] (a clearly functional programming language and the result of the famous paper "Can Programming Be Liberated From the von Neumann Style?") appeared in 1977 - was inspired by much earlier efforts like APL.

OOP really only became a thing with Simula in 1967, but was not popular until the 1980's with Smalltalk and Common Lisp's Object System (CLOS) came about (so yes, there was a OOP/FP hybrid already decades ago), and then C++ and finally Java much later... at which time Functional Programming languages already included Miranda (1985) which later evolved into Haskell, and Erlang (1986). That is, FPP languages were at least as common as OOP languages by the 80's.

As far as I know, however, pure functional languages were not really very efficient until Haskell came about, while OOP languages were nearly on par with procedural style: which mattered a lot in 1980's machines.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP_(programming_language)

Re: The Flix Programming Language

#38

Post by mejutoco »

usrbinbash wrote: post #34
ReleaseCandidat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The irony is, that FP could probably have had a lot more success if it didn't clamour on about pure functions so much Except functional languages like Lisps and the MLs never were pure, the only (used by a significant number of people) has been Miranda/Haskell (ignoring Coq and the other proof assistents). Or, to put it in other words: ML (no, not that ML) turned 50 this year, Scheme is oder than 50 too and Miranda…

Yes, there have. And not a single one of them was able to even gain a sizeable fraction of the mindspace that imperative languages have, let alone replace or obsolete even a single one of them . So maybe it's time for FP as a whole to accept the fact, that there seems to be something fundamental about the way it's paraded implementations look and feel like, that puts off a lot of programmers. Maybe it's time for FP t…

Strict/constrained things are generally less appealing. That does not mean they are not the right approach. I dont agree with the popularity contest approach though.

Many languages are in use for different things without the need for a language to win. It is a bit anthropomorphic to approach tools like that IMO.

Instead, there has been a healthy influence of more research FP languages into mainstream languages (as you mention), more interesting experimental languages, etc. Aka everything working as intended.

Re: The Flix Programming Language

#39

Post by rmuratov »

brigandish wrote: post #32
subarctic wrote: post #13

Lots of interesting bits in the FAQ: https://flix.dev/faq/ Particularly in the sections titled "What features are not supported" (no exceptions or panics, so e.g. indexing has to return an Option in case it's out of bounds) and "What controversial design choices are made". Some pithy remarks towards the end as well. To follow HN tradition and find the most controversial topic to discuss, my guess is it's either not a…

I also don't like "Unused definitions, type declarations, etc. are compile-time errors" as I often want to test the validity of a statement, like a type declaration, by compiling before using it. Much prefer warnings. I don't mind the disallowing name shadowing, but I really, really hate (I mean that) websites that are just good ol' text and the odd picture that require Javascript. The excuse of "we used React, it's…

> We use JavaScript for the online code editor.

Re: The Flix Programming Language

#40

Post by troupo »

brigandish wrote: post #32
subarctic wrote: post #13

Lots of interesting bits in the FAQ: https://flix.dev/faq/ Particularly in the sections titled "What features are not supported" (no exceptions or panics, so e.g. indexing has to return an Option in case it's out of bounds) and "What controversial design choices are made". Some pithy remarks towards the end as well. To follow HN tradition and find the most controversial topic to discuss, my guess is it's either not a…

I also don't like "Unused definitions, type declarations, etc. are compile-time errors" as I often want to test the validity of a statement, like a type declaration, by compiling before using it. Much prefer warnings. I don't mind the disallowing name shadowing, but I really, really hate (I mean that) websites that are just good ol' text and the odd picture that require Javascript. The excuse of "we used React, it's…

I think go made the same silly choice.

Make those warnings in debug/test builds, and errors in prod builds.

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