That font is so thin it's almost uncomfortable to read.
I've never heard of Pony before - is it any good, or worth playing around with?
We moved from Pony to Rust
51–60 of 178 posts
Re: We moved from Pony to Rust
#52This feels like the same pattern as Dark leaving OCaml for F#: https://blog.darklang.com/leaving-ocaml// . Ecosystem matters a lot these days. Outside of these two specific cases, I wonder if we're, as an industry, too afraid of writing this kind of stuff now I feel like it was done a lot before, and not at all these days. Sure, NIH syndrome is a fallacy, but having to write one library may not be so bad. I would be…
How depressing. Probably true. But depressing nevertheless. Bigger frameworks, more complicated libraries, deeper multi tiered tooling, all of these things that we call ecosystem, reduce access to general purpose programming and creativity. We've created a bureaucracy of execution so complicated that we need vast amounts of funding to keep us at the tiller doing the biddings of e-commerce apps. It's like the founding…
If you're doing things on servers that you manage yourself and not using lots of saas, you can probably still do things in an obscure programming language.
Re: We moved from Pony to Rust
#53This feels like the same pattern as Dark leaving OCaml for F#: https://blog.darklang.com/leaving-ocaml// . Ecosystem matters a lot these days. Outside of these two specific cases, I wonder if we're, as an industry, too afraid of writing this kind of stuff now I feel like it was done a lot before, and not at all these days. Sure, NIH syndrome is a fallacy, but having to write one library may not be so bad. I would be…
That is why when comparing languages we should always look beyond grammar and semantics. This is nothing new, it is also a reason why languages like C and C++ won the systems programming wars from the 1990's. After a while one gets tired to write wrapper libraries, or having to pay extra for an additional compiler that isn't part of the platform SDKs. Hence why successful languages always need some kind of killer fea…
I wrote about the economics of programming languages a while back:
https://www.welton.it/articles/programming_language_economic...
Re: We moved from Pony to Rust
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
OCaml is old and reliable, and I think it was already proven to work in the industry when Jane Street chose it. Even if it wasn't the best programming language ever, it was still a strong choice at the time, and still is. Pony on the other hand was and still is very young. I'm not saying it's a bad choice, but it's definitely not the same risk profile as OCaml. It's just OCaml by the way, for Objective Caml. Unless y…
Maybe they should have used a horse, they are much more reliable than camels and more mature than ponies.
Horses aren't actually more mature than Ponies.
Ponies mature more quickly than horses, they are merely smaller.
https://www.thesprucepets.com/the-difference-between-horses-...
Re: We moved from Pony to Rust
#55I just wish Pony would reach 1.0 already. I'm very hesitant to spend my time on a language that might change under me.
Re: We moved from Pony to Rust
#56One of the hardest things at any company is recruiting and retaining top talent.
I’m sure some devs would love to learn a new language at a new job, but many would see it as a career mistake. Your career income increases the more you master a certain discipline like a certain language. If you’re a jack of all trades (and adding Pony developer to your resume), you’re probably limiting your future income potential.
Re: We moved from Pony to Rust
#57This feels like the same pattern as Dark leaving OCaml for F#: https://blog.darklang.com/leaving-ocaml// . Ecosystem matters a lot these days. Outside of these two specific cases, I wonder if we're, as an industry, too afraid of writing this kind of stuff now I feel like it was done a lot before, and not at all these days. Sure, NIH syndrome is a fallacy, but having to write one library may not be so bad. I would be…
Kind of, but like OCaml-to-F# is like "Dark goes from the Prius of languages nobody uses, to the Tesla of the .NET ecosystem." The aims (ecological in the car case) of the purchaser are similar, but the car [at least in its ecosystem] is sleeker and now the roads are a bit different. On the other hand this is like "Wallaroo moves from the Cadillac of languages nobody uses, to the Chevy Equinox of languages nobody use…
I feel like you missed an opportunity to compare Pony to some variety of pony car.
Re: We moved from Pony to Rust
#58That font is so thin it's almost uncomfortable to read. I've never heard of Pony before - is it any good, or worth playing around with?
I'm a Pony core team member. I think its quite good in the most general sense, but "is it good for your problem" is entirely different.
I think at worst, you would get something out of learning Pony (although that can take some time, it's one of the harder languages to learn).
Feel free to stop by our Zulip and chat more as folks from the Pony community are rarely on HN, but are on the Zulip all the time.
Re: We moved from Pony to Rust
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't agree with this at all. While it's true that there are lots of bad libraries and many libraries are easy, you really isolate yourself from the broader ecosystem by doing this. Vendors and 3rd party solutions are now much harder to use, and when you use them you'll probably only use them at a surface level instead of using all the features. And some things are so mature and vast you don't have a chance of buil…
> If what you are doing can be done well in very mature ecosystems like React or PyTorch, the effort to recreate them will dwarf the time spend on important work. Sometimes that's effort that's not really necessary. At work we had a team build a dashboard with React and a few graphs recently. It clocks at 2000 unique dependencies. That's not a typo, it's two thousands dependencies for a few graphs. Reimplementing all…
I guess you mean 2000 dev dependencies because for production that would be crazy.
Re: We moved from Pony to Rust
#60There are people commenting that Pony was the wrong choice from the get go, but many of us have only heard of this startup (which operates in a saturated market) because they were using Pony.
As the head of engineering at the time that we made the decision, that had nothing to do with it, but I suppose it can't hurt.
That said, I don't think we ever got any business as a result of folks having heard of Wallaroo from any of the promotion we tried to do around technical decisions.
We did however attract interest from investors who would notice when our technical content did well on HN. It certainly didn't hurt during fundraising.
Our decision to go with Pony for the original product we were building (high performance, finance focused, stream processing) was in a large part driven by time to market. We didn't have runway to build our own high-performance runtime for the product and using Pony got us that runtime.
You can hear me talking more about the decision process here:
https://corecursive.com/055-unproven-with-sean-allen/
There was more to it than that, but the "we get a runtime that can meet our needs" was a huge, huge part of why we picked Pony. I have often told people that we didn't so much pick a language as we picked the runtime and the language came along with it. That's not really true, but it's not really wrong either.