41–50 of 126 posts
do functional languages mainly appeal to computer language enthusiasts/researchers? im just not seeing the benefit personally.
Many functional zealots aim for a purity beyond all reason and comprehension. When what you really want is something like Erlang/Elixir or even C#.
do functional languages mainly appeal to computer language enthusiasts/researchers? im just not seeing the benefit personally.
You need a pragmatic combination of functional and non-functional. Many functional zealots aim for a purity beyond all reason and comprehension. When what you really want is something like Erlang/Elixir or even C#.
Rough edges, but I'm really liking it so far. Let's see how it will handle the upcoming Advent of Code.
do functional languages mainly appeal to computer language enthusiasts/researchers? im just not seeing the benefit personally.
Do you worry about side-effects that leak beyond the scope of the routines you're authoring? Why / why not?
Other advantages of pure FP might be thread safety but queues take care of most of this (and often locks are not hard to use). Or low-level compositionality. But as Alan Kay said, what we need are bigger objects. John Ousterhout seems to agree. Re-use in the small increases complexity.
- We are trying to make the entire compiler resilient (error-tolerant), incremental, and parallel. We have managed to make every single compiler phase (of which there are 28) parallel. This has already led to significant speed-ups. We are now trying to increase the degree of parallelism within each phase. We are also working on error resilience to provide LSP support no matter what errors a program contains (syntax, naming, type). For example, it should be possible to rename a variable even if the program currently has multiple errors.
- We are adding support for algebraic effects and handlers. This will allow users to define and handle their own effects.
- We are also exploring a novel way to combine type classes ("traits") and effects.
- We have recently added support for package management and integration with Maven.
In summary, we are already in a great spot, and useful programs can be written in Flix today. I encourage you to check out the documentation: https://doc.flix.dev/ and to try Flix!
(I am one of the developers of Flix).
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…
Any language that does it, is beyond usable (notably go and zig). Like, I would literally fork the compiler before using them with that “feature” on. It’s completely braindead thing to do — like okay, have a separate production release mode and make it an error there. But for quickly testing out stuff, you will inevitably comment something out, which makes a variable unused. Commenting that out will also make something else unused, so you literally have a recursive problem with some random depth, and depending on how deep it goes, you will literally lose all of the context on what you wanted to debug in the first place.
There is literally zero advantage of this idiotic bullshit, my proposed solution of doing it only in prod release gives all the benefits with none of the negatives.
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 am one of the developers of Flix)
do functional languages mainly appeal to computer language enthusiasts/researchers? im just not seeing the benefit personally.
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…
But I agree, this can be cumbersome. So, Flix allows any unused construct to be prefixed with an underscore to mark it as unused. (But underscored things cannot be referenced.) This seems like a pragmatic trade-off.
(I am one of the developers of Flix).