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We moved from Pony to Rust

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Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#71

Post by Karrot_Kream »

travisgriggs wrote: post #49
Zababa wrote: post #16

This 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…

This is how it is in every applied field. It's not as if 2x4s fall from trees and we use them in our construction. The 2x4 is a specific manufacturing output that's used as inputs for lots and lots of other things. It's the same way when it comes to software. Just like when doing cabinetry nothing is stopping you from processing wood yourself, likewise nothing is stopping you from rolling your own frameworks. But then you'll find you're closer to selling a Morton Chair [1] than regular furniture. (And FWIW that might be fine for your problem domain, especially if you're in the market of beautiful, high-value, handmade chairs with long lead times.)

[1]: https://www.mortonfurniture.com/

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#72

Post by thaumasiotes »

Zababa wrote: post #45
crdrost wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I mean that's fair too. My impressions are poorly formed but the analogy is that both F# and OCaml are based on functional programming, which to my mind takes a step back from the "imperative programming -> OOP -> shared state multithreading" history into an alternative history, I'm phrasing this as them being "electric cars" for the first half. OCaml is not really the swankiest of swank in the alt-languages com…

I think it's one of those cases where using metaphors doesn't help clarify the thought, and instead obscure it. Rust shares a lot with OCaml, and so with F#. F# is "the" functional programming language of the .NET world, but it's also because it's the only one, and it's a second class citizen. I will also add that Rust is not trying to be C (and neither trying to "replace C"). It's here to offer an alternative, that…

> Rust shares a lot with OCaml, and so with F#. F# is "the" functional programming language of the .NET world, but it's also because it's the only one, and it's a second class citizen.

I thought F# was OCaml?

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#73

Post by chillfox »

wyager wrote: post #18
Zababa wrote: post #16

This 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…

I used to work at an OCaml company and it wasn't nearly as much of an issue as one might predict. You can (it turns out) build a very successful business even if there aren't a lot of existing libraries, or if the language lacks certain basic features like native multithreading (same with Python of course). I don't have a great model for why this isn't devastatingly expensive, but it's probably some combination of *…

Multi-threading can often be handed off to the OS in the form of just run more processes. So in most cases there is really no need for the language to handle it.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#74

Post by closeparen »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #63
wyager wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at an OCaml company and it wasn't nearly as much of an issue as one might predict. You can (it turns out) build a very successful business even if there aren't a lot of existing libraries, or if the language lacks certain basic features like native multithreading (same with Python of course). I don't have a great model for why this isn't devastatingly expensive, but it's probably some combination of *…

I think Jane Street is a big exception. It's like when PG espouses lisp. Back in the 90's[1] language ecosystems were very sparse. An ecosystem was a few big libraries and a syntax highlighter. Now stuff like IDEs, linting, packages, etc. have made people's standards quite high for ecosystems. On the flip side, back in the day languages like OCaml and Lisp had stuff other languages could only dream about. Functions a…

Clojure has access to the Java library ecosystem and works beautifully in IntelliJ. That may be one of the best ratios of language properties to tooling quality.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#75

Post by closeparen »

wyager wrote: post #67
hardwaregeek wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Jane Street is a big exception. It's like when PG espouses lisp. Back in the 90's[1] language ecosystems were very sparse. An ecosystem was a few big libraries and a syntax highlighter. Now stuff like IDEs, linting, packages, etc. have made people's standards quite high for ecosystems. On the flip side, back in the day languages like OCaml and Lisp had stuff other languages could only dream about. Functions a…

A couple points: These days, you don’t need to build an IDE from scratch - you can just build some language server support for your language and plug into existing IDEs. It’s much less work! Also, as an aside that’s not really germane to the argument, it’s possible (and IMO preferable) to write code without using an IDE. It forces you to write code that’s broken up into contexts small enough to fit in human working m…

I can work without autocomplete, but I find my productivity is about 20% when I have to go back and forth with the compiler on syntax errors and symbol names, like back in college. Working professionally with an IDE that just doesn't happen.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#76

Post by d3nj4l »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #72
Zababa wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's one of those cases where using metaphors doesn't help clarify the thought, and instead obscure it. Rust shares a lot with OCaml, and so with F#. F# is "the" functional programming language of the .NET world, but it's also because it's the only one, and it's a second class citizen. I will also add that Rust is not trying to be C (and neither trying to "replace C"). It's here to offer an alternative, that…

> Rust shares a lot with OCaml, and so with F#. F# is "the" functional programming language of the .NET world, but it's also because it's the only one, and it's a second class citizen. I thought F# was OCaml?

No, F# has a lot more OO than OCaml, and there’s a significant difference in features (ex active patterns in F#, functors OCaml). I liked what I used of F#, but for any serious program it’s more Multi-paradigm than functional, since you’ll end up doing a lot of OO.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#77

Post by d3nj4l »

pjmlp wrote: post #43
crdrost wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I mean that's fair too. My impressions are poorly formed but the analogy is that both F# and OCaml are based on functional programming, which to my mind takes a step back from the "imperative programming -> OOP -> shared state multithreading" history into an alternative history, I'm phrasing this as them being "electric cars" for the first half. OCaml is not really the swankiest of swank in the alt-languages com…

Except the O in OCaml stands for Objective Caml, and F# has plenty of OOP features to interoperate with .NET ecosystem.

While it is true that OCaml does support a kind of OOP, even the OCaml manual outright states that it isn’t used much: https://ocaml.org/manual/objectexamples.html

I think the biggest use for objects is to have a kind of row polymorphism? I don’t know too much because I haven’t used them at all.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#78

Post by d3nj4l »

lmm wrote: post #68
Zababa wrote: post #16

This 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…

It's not just the libraries, it's the tools, and those are a much bigger lift. I noticed it with Scala dropping Eclipse support and some users shifting to Kotlin; you couldn't have a clearer example of a strictly worse language, but JetBrains and Google are supporting it, and the difference between a good IDE and not is huge. And when I tried to step up and fix the Scala Eclipse plugin myself and saw what kind of byz…

Why can’t you just use IntelliJ CE? You won’t get some of the web programming features, but otherwise it’s perfectly capable.

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#79

Post by scarmig »

crdrost wrote: post #40
_dwt wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a little about cars and I'm still confused - I think I just have a very different view of the relative "it factors" between each pair of languages. De gustibus...

Yeah I mean that's fair too. My impressions are poorly formed but the analogy is that both F# and OCaml are based on functional programming, which to my mind takes a step back from the "imperative programming -> OOP -> shared state multithreading" history into an alternative history, I'm phrasing this as them being "electric cars" for the first half. OCaml is not really the swankiest of swank in the alt-languages com…

I have a very different perception of OCaml compared to you (compared to most people?)

When I think of OCaml, the concepts that come to mind are brilliant French computer scientists and hedge funds. A practical Haskell. When I think of F#, I think of... .NET, bright enterprise programmers who want to work with a tolerable language, and that's about it. If forced to name a user of it, I'd say "uhh, no idea... Maybe Stack Overflow?"

(That's entirely aside from the relative merits of both languages, which are leaps and bounds ahead of both most OOP and functional languages.)

Re: We moved from Pony to Rust

#80

Post by abacadaba »

_dwt wrote: post #37
Zababa wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anything about cars and don't understand your metaphor at all, sorry.

I know a little about cars and I'm still confused - I think I just have a very different view of the relative "it factors" between each pair of languages. De gustibus...

tldr: Elm is a Cybertruck
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