4 ms·

..until you need to use somebody's Mensa-level-obfuscated, undocumented, library. Life is too short.

by vegabook 11y ago

Ericson2314 11y ago
Are you saying that doesn't happen in the OCaml ecosystem?
- vegabook 11y ago
  yes it does. Fair comment. But Haskell attracts the 1% CS elites who, sadly, are counterproductive to the language's wider adoption. Ocaml is not pure enough for these guys, and so, a paradoxically smaller community produces a higher amount of actually practical stuff that an imperative "dunce" like me can hope to aspire to using. If I may put it another way, Haskell is too beautiful for its own good, because it encourages "art", not engineering.
  - Ericson2314 11y ago
    As a Haskell User, ....yes I can totally be a non-productive artist, but I can also bite my tongue, disable the language extension, and get shit done too :). Consider from other perspective. Yes there are some pretty crazy libraries out there, but I assure the more (in)famous are indeed used, and used practically by much of the people who do, let's say, work professionally in Haskell. Now maybe that does create an inner-circle trap that impedes broader adaption among developers, but the services/app/executables do get made. The thing that bugs me about OCaml is many of the flaws are just so damn simple-stupid. Not module limitation, but == and friends, let's say (to use things from link). I respect the ML tradition, but I think Rust is going to eat OCaml's lunch on the pedagogy/developer-mind-share front.
    - vegabook 11y ago
      You have just persuaded me to give Rust a try... I like the idea of an advanced programming language with a pedagogical bent, that still allows me to get shit done. Since you seem to be a functional guy, the fact that you respect Rust is a selling point for me. EDIT: oops - no REPL in Rust. Big hurdle for a data-science guy like myself. Scala/Ocaml/Haskell: all have REPL. That's also a big impediment to the pedagogical angle.
      - Ericson2314 11y ago
        Great! I am a functional programmer at heart. But I definitely have masochistic system programming tendencies, and Rust is a good outlet. I have high hopes for Rust to be the gateway drug to the world of good languages. I do which it was more powerful in some respects, but it's definitely slick. There's plenty of really head-shaking mistakes in OCaml that everyone will run into from day one, that, like the OP, I can't imagine why they were made in the first place. Rust doesn't have those.
        Ericson2314 11y ago
        And since what I really want for systems programming is a library like http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/nick/coqasm.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/nick/coqasm.pd..., at some level it's inevitable I wouldn't find Rust powerful enough.
      - Ericson2314 11y ago
        Oh bummer, yeah analysis-type tasks is precisely where the REPL is most essential, not going to lie. I hope https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1298-incremental-compilation.md https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1298-incr... will help bridge the gap. And perhaps help with writing a REPL too...
      - thinkpad20 11y ago
        It's a shame too because rust used to have a repl back in the day. I'm sure they had reasons to get rid of it, but it's still a shame. I understand there's some sort of initiative to write another one though, but I don't know what its status is.

..until you need to use somebody's Mensa-level-obfuscated, undocumented, library. Life is too short.

Ericson2314 11y ago

Are you saying that doesn't happen in the OCaml ecosystem?

vegabook 11y ago
yes it does. Fair comment. But Haskell attracts the 1% CS elites who, sadly, are counterproductive to the language's wider adoption. Ocaml is not pure enough for these guys, and so, a paradoxically smaller community produces a higher amount of actually practical stuff that an imperative "dunce" like me can hope to aspire to using. If I may put it another way, Haskell is too beautiful for its own good, because it encourages "art", not engineering.
- Ericson2314 11y ago
  As a Haskell User, ....yes I can totally be a non-productive artist, but I can also bite my tongue, disable the language extension, and get shit done too :). Consider from other perspective. Yes there are some pretty crazy libraries out there, but I assure the more (in)famous are indeed used, and used practically by much of the people who do, let's say, work professionally in Haskell. Now maybe that does create an inner-circle trap that impedes broader adaption among developers, but the services/app/executables do get made. The thing that bugs me about OCaml is many of the flaws are just so damn simple-stupid. Not module limitation, but == and friends, let's say (to use things from link). I respect the ML tradition, but I think Rust is going to eat OCaml's lunch on the pedagogy/developer-mind-share front.
  - vegabook 11y ago
    You have just persuaded me to give Rust a try... I like the idea of an advanced programming language with a pedagogical bent, that still allows me to get shit done. Since you seem to be a functional guy, the fact that you respect Rust is a selling point for me. EDIT: oops - no REPL in Rust. Big hurdle for a data-science guy like myself. Scala/Ocaml/Haskell: all have REPL. That's also a big impediment to the pedagogical angle.
    - Ericson2314 11y ago
      Great! I am a functional programmer at heart. But I definitely have masochistic system programming tendencies, and Rust is a good outlet. I have high hopes for Rust to be the gateway drug to the world of good languages. I do which it was more powerful in some respects, but it's definitely slick. There's plenty of really head-shaking mistakes in OCaml that everyone will run into from day one, that, like the OP, I can't imagine why they were made in the first place. Rust doesn't have those.
      - Ericson2314 11y ago
        And since what I really want for systems programming is a library like http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/nick/coqasm.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/nick/coqasm.pd..., at some level it's inevitable I wouldn't find Rust powerful enough.
    - Ericson2314 11y ago
      Oh bummer, yeah analysis-type tasks is precisely where the REPL is most essential, not going to lie. I hope https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1298-incremental-compilation.md https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1298-incr... will help bridge the gap. And perhaps help with writing a REPL too...
    - thinkpad20 11y ago
      It's a shame too because rust used to have a repl back in the day. I'm sure they had reasons to get rid of it, but it's still a shame. I understand there's some sort of initiative to write another one though, but I don't know what its status is.