Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

roc-lang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 180 posts

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#61

Post by johnisgood »

jchw wrote: post #60
johnisgood wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not even have known about this drama without the person who reminded us of it. That said, I still do not care about it at all. Imagine me not using Linux because of Linus being harsh (yet educative) to some people... or not using OpenBSD because of Theo... or not using Common Lisp because of #lisp... :P I have received some hostile feedback personally, but they were in the right. I did not take it to heart bu…

It's very easy to say this having not invested anything into Elm and not been there. I'm just thankful that most of what I invested in Elm was only time, and we never actually wound up deploying Elm to the frontend. Forget about all of the drama, imagine if you used Linux and it stopped updating at 2.6. Elm has been at 0.19 since 2018, and that's not because there's nothing left to improve on.

> imagine if you used Linux and it stopped updating at 2.6. Elm has been at 0.19 since 2018, and that's not because there's nothing left to improve on.

Yup, that definitely would be an issue.

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#62

Post by garethrowlands »

skitter wrote: post #5

Neat, looks like the website got an overhaul. I like Roc's approach of detecting errors statically but still trying to let you run the code. If a snippet is work in progress and has an unused variable, Go or Zig will refuse to compile it. Yes, an unused variable indicates a problem, which is why it's not going to pass any sensible CI setup and make its way into production, but that doesn't mean I should be disallowed…

Haskell reports compilation errors as warnings too.

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#63

Post by ctenb »

satvikpendem wrote: post #13

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…

There is an argument that people who made mistakes and genuinely learned from them and apologized could be more trustworthy than people who had not made that mistake to begin with.

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#64

Post by asplake »

Having a play with Gleam right now. Roc's managed effects sounds interesting, maybe Gleam could layer something similar atop Erlang's OTP? Right now, outside a database, it's not clear to this newbie how state is meant to be managed in Misty, the Gleam web framework I am kicking the tyres of. If I can be bothered, I was seeing myself having to delegate state management to a separate process (which Gleam seems to support well, but it's work I didn't anticipate and I am at this stage only playing).

Edit: related to state management, the "platform" concept looks interesting too https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/wiki/Roc-concepts-explained#...

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#65

Post by evanwalsh »

whalesalad wrote: post #55
Eji1700 wrote: post #38

Looks interesting. I'm a huge fan of F# and think anything working in that hybridish space is the way to go. I'll have to dedicate some more time to this when I get a moment.

I've been on the F# website for 5 minutes now looking through damn near every page and I cannot find a single page that shows me a simple example program or the syntax at all. Everything is hidden behind some kind of "let's get started!" wizard. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/languages/fsharp-he...

Here's a decent tour: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/fsharp/

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#66

Post by whalesalad »

evanwalsh wrote: post #65
whalesalad wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on the F# website for 5 minutes now looking through damn near every page and I cannot find a single page that shows me a simple example program or the syntax at all. Everything is hidden behind some kind of "let's get started!" wizard. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/languages/fsharp-he...

Here's a decent tour: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/fsharp/

this website is great - should truthfully be 50% of the index.html of every language project ever.

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#67

Post by wk_end »

tromp wrote: post #10

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

Haskell programmers tend to love their monads, but the treatment of effects here ("Tasks"), looks to be - and this is highly subjective - more intuitive and straightforward.

ETA: Also if I'm reading this right Roc appears to natively support some kind of row polymorphism. That's a nice-to-have.

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#68

Post by igouy »

whalesalad wrote: post #55
Eji1700 wrote: post #38

Looks interesting. I'm a huge fan of F# and think anything working in that hybridish space is the way to go. I'll have to dedicate some more time to this when I get a moment.

I've been on the F# website for 5 minutes now looking through damn near every page and I cannot find a single page that shows me a simple example program or the syntax at all. Everything is hidden behind some kind of "let's get started!" wizard. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/languages/fsharp-he...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/what-is-fsha...

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#69

Post by mgomez »

whalesalad wrote: post #55
Eji1700 wrote: post #38

Looks interesting. I'm a huge fan of F# and think anything working in that hybridish space is the way to go. I'll have to dedicate some more time to this when I get a moment.

I've been on the F# website for 5 minutes now looking through damn near every page and I cannot find a single page that shows me a simple example program or the syntax at all. Everything is hidden behind some kind of "let's get started!" wizard. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/languages/fsharp-he...

Here's a non-wizard tutorial that I bookmarked when I started with F# (I also had a hard time finding a simple example at first):

https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/fsharp/get-started/get-st...

What I like about this page is that it shows a basic project structure.

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#70

Post by shortrounddev2 »

ReleaseCandidat wrote: post #54
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #44

Has anyone else noticed that functional languages go heavy on the special keywords and operators? It feels like theres a larger cognitive load (more specific keywords to memorize) when learning languages like F# or OCaml compared to C or Python or Java

Actually they both (and OCaml has a whole lot of almost never used OOP - that's where the O comes from) have _way_ less "syntax" than Python or Java.

I just did some quick math. If you count all the keywords and operators for F# in microsoft's documentation, you come to 150 symbols. This doesn't include the nullary operators (of which there are 14)

Counting all the java operators and keywords, you get 84. This doesn't include assignment operators like "+=" or "-=" (11 such operators).

ChatGPT tells me that python has 36 keywords and 28 operators (not including the 13 assignment operators). This seems low and may be missing some syntactical sugar operators, but even then 64 is a far lower number than F#'s 150. Much debate could be had about which of these operators are fair to count or not, but it seems preliminarily that the data supports the position that functional programming languages (or at least F#) tend to go heavy on special keywords and operators

Post reply on HN