Alpaca – Functional programming inspired by ML for the Erlang VM • Hacker News Board

Re: Alpaca – Functional programming inspired by ML for the Erlang VM

#71

Post by bluejekyll » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 3:28 PM UTC

jnbiche wrote: post #62

Ixiaus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust?

Rust doesn't have fast compile, and I think it's hard to argue that a language without TCO is a functional language. Recursion is a critical part of the functional paradigm. Also, I think a lot of people are attracted to Go because it's very simple to learn and use. Rust with its borrow checker is definitely not simple to learn and use. But it's true Rust has some functional features.

That simplicity comes at a cost. The cost is duplicate code, less strict error handling and the billion dollar mistake.

I know that some people downplay the importance of these things; I find that because Rust has strong guarantees in these areas it helps to reduce work, reduce bugs and increase confidence in the software.

And use 'cargo check' during Dev for faster compiles.

Re: Alpaca – Functional programming inspired by ML for the Erlang VM

#72

Post by leshow » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 4:25 PM UTC

salimmadjd wrote: post #4

Really hoping this project gets more traction. I'm learning Elm now and I'm really liking the syntax to the level that other languages feel rather cluttered to me now. The more I'm playing with types and learning to leverage them, the more I appreciate their power (yes, I'm late to the game) so making this statically typed is very interesting. However, there seem to be a saturation of new languages and not sure if th…

I think Elm is great, but the language designer has really crippled it IMO by not including abstractions for types. Something analogous to typeclasses would be hugely beneficial. As it is the language gets around it by making some built in things magic, I found this frustrating after a while.

Re: Alpaca – Functional programming inspired by ML for the Erlang VM

#73

Post by jmcdiesel » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 4:30 PM UTC

Can anyone explain why it seems like so many new languages are reinventing things that seemingly have little effect, but they seem to be changing them "just because"

We have comments in code for decades now. // and /* */ are easily the bigest standard, with # coming in second. Why '--' in this language? Why "``" in another language i saw recently?

I cant imagine this gives any real benifit to the coder or the compiler, and it seems to be more difficult because now the IDEs have to be configured for a(nother) new comment type, it has be become muscle memory again, its yet another "common ground" peice of code that requires context switching to change between languages...

I get doing new things with the functional features of a language, im all for trying new things and seeing what works... just seems wierd to have so many ways to comment code... such an insignificant part, why change?

Re: Alpaca – Functional programming inspired by ML for the Erlang VM

#74

Post by leshow » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 4:31 PM UTC

spraak wrote: post #22

jerf wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always room for another language. What's hard is cracking into the very, very top tier, the C++, C#, Java, etc. tier. I am also increasingly of the opinion that it simply takes massive corporate backing to get to that level, based on the observation that I haven't seen anything get to that level without it. Python's the only one that has arguably gotten there, I think, and it's still debatable. That said, I d…

I'd love to have something that takes the best of Go (static typing, fast compiles, binaries, community) and functional paradigm.

Haskell?

Some of it's parallelism and concurrency features should look familiar to you (it has an M:N threading model), complete with channels, and some stuff you've probably never heard of like STM. It compiles to a binary, has a type system much more powerful and expressive than Go's, and the community is very helpful.

I will say the compile times aren't very speedy, I assume you want fast compile times in order to type check your code, and for that there is ghc-mod.

Re: Alpaca – Functional programming inspired by ML for the Erlang VM

#75

Post by leshow » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 4:35 PM UTC

dalailambda wrote: post #39

platz wrote: post #3

I continue to be believe even as a static typing fan that static types are fundamentally incompatible with OTP and it's goals. Distributed systems just seem to too thorny for static types to subjugate/bend to their will. Sure, you can declare global invariants ahead of time that your cluster must uphold, but it's a bit less "distributed" in a real sense then

While I agree that the OTP perhaps is not as easily statically typed, since it was built with Erlang in mind, I do think that static typing adds a layer of robustness to distributed systems, especially if you design it that way upfront. In my experience the problem comes when you try to apply static typing to a dynamic system.

> In my experience the problem comes when you try to apply static typing to a dynamic system.

As in, because it compiles down to a dynamic system, it's no good?

There are plenty of languages that give us strong static guarantees and compile down to dynamic or untyped languages. Look at Purescript, Elm, etc. They all do quite well compiling down to JS.

Don't forget that assembly isn't strongly typed either, and most languages compile down to that. I don't see anything wrong with a static typed layer that compiles to dynamic code, the interface you're providing is still type safe.

Re: Alpaca – Functional programming inspired by ML for the Erlang VM

#76

Post by platz » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 4:36 PM UTC

spraak wrote: post #22

jerf wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always room for another language. What's hard is cracking into the very, very top tier, the C++, C#, Java, etc. tier. I am also increasingly of the opinion that it simply takes massive corporate backing to get to that level, based on the observation that I haven't seen anything get to that level without it. Python's the only one that has arguably gotten there, I think, and it's still debatable. That said, I d…

I'd love to have something that takes the best of Go (static typing, fast compiles, binaries, community) and functional paradigm.

this thread is like that time when there was a post about common lisp and then everyone started talking about clojure

Re: Alpaca – Functional programming inspired by ML for the Erlang VM

#77

Post by SmellyGeekBoy » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 4:37 PM UTC

jmcdiesel wrote: post #73

Can anyone explain why it seems like so many new languages are reinventing things that seemingly have little effect, but they seem to be changing them "just because" We have comments in code for decades now. // and /* */ are easily the bigest standard, with # coming in second. Why '--' in this language? Why "``" in another language i saw recently? I cant imagine this gives any real benifit to the coder or the compile…

SQL uses '--' for comments.

Re: Alpaca – Functional programming inspired by ML for the Erlang VM

#78

Post by yawaramin » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 4:45 PM UTC

jmcdiesel wrote: post #73

Can anyone explain why it seems like so many new languages are reinventing things that seemingly have little effect, but they seem to be changing them "just because" We have comments in code for decades now. // and /* */ are easily the bigest standard, with # coming in second. Why '--' in this language? Why "``" in another language i saw recently? I cant imagine this gives any real benifit to the coder or the compile…

You may be pleased to hear that ReasonML chose /* */ for its OCaml syntax refresh just for familiarity.

Re: Alpaca – Functional programming inspired by ML for the Erlang VM

#79

Post by lepoetemaudit » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 4:56 PM UTC

jmcdiesel wrote: post #73

Can anyone explain why it seems like so many new languages are reinventing things that seemingly have little effect, but they seem to be changing them "just because" We have comments in code for decades now. // and /* */ are easily the bigest standard, with # coming in second. Why '--' in this language? Why "``" in another language i saw recently? I cant imagine this gives any real benifit to the coder or the compile…

It's -- in both Elm and Haskell for comments, so it's not new and part of the heritage of the language.

Re: Alpaca – Functional programming inspired by ML for the Erlang VM

#80

Post by SEMW » Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 4:58 PM UTC

jmcdiesel wrote: post #73

Can anyone explain why it seems like so many new languages are reinventing things that seemingly have little effect, but they seem to be changing them "just because" We have comments in code for decades now. // and /* */ are easily the bigest standard, with # coming in second. Why '--' in this language? Why "``" in another language i saw recently? I cant imagine this gives any real benifit to the coder or the compile…

> why change?

They didn't. The syntax is explicitly stated to be a mixture of OCaml and Elm. The -- comment syntax is from Elm. Elm in turn got it from Haskell.