4 ms·

...and? Is it faster? Is it shorter? Has it fixed bugs? Does it have more functionality? What reason does a user or potential user of this library have to care

...and? Is it faster? Is it shorter? Has it fixed bugs? Does it have more functionality? What reason does a user or potential user of this library have to care that it's now written in another language?

steveklabnik 10y ago
There is already a top-level comment asking this question, with a few replies https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13351066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13351066
- lacampbell 10y ago
  My job right now is working on a C# codebase. I'd love to re-write everything in F#. I feel like it's higher level, less prone to error, and would make the codebase much smaller. The thing is - no one is going to be impressed if they hear it's been re-written in F# because I assume doing so is going to make the software easier to maintain, easier to extend and more reliable. Not management, not users, no-one. Now, if I did the re-write and LOC went down by half, or performance improved, or it fixed a lot of bugs, or I was able to add features in much more quickly because abstractions were tighter and easier to create and the compiler was able to check more constraints for me - then people might take notice. There is, however, no inherent value in the source language being changed in itself.
  - steveklabnik 10y ago
    That's what makes blog posts like this tricky: this post is one for the project itself, which means that its audience is already for people who know what the project is, etc. Someone posted it on HN, and it got upvotes, so it gets to a broader audience, who may not inherently know these kinds of things, or not care. So your point here is valid, that is, "as someone _not_ in that audience, why should I care?" That's what the other thread, with its replies, is getting at. Which is why I pointed to you to it. It's possible as well, of course, that maybe that _still_ means this doesn't matter to you. Which is also expected; nobody is going to like every thread on HN. That's why the guidelines[1] have the section of "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site." And it gives you something to do instead: " If you think a story is spam or off-topic, flag it by clicking on its 'flag' link." And beyond that, you could just skip this thread and read any of the other 29 posts on the front page. That's how I usually handle posts that I don't have any particular interest in. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - lacampbell 10y ago
      Constructive criticism is nothing to shy away from or be defensive about. Having criticism for something doesn't mean I think it's spam or off topic. Again, for an example of a language X-to-language-Y rewrite story with some substance, that did a lot to boost the image of the language in many peoples eyes, see: http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/06/06/python-to-ocaml-retrospective/ http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/06/06/python-to-ocaml-ret... I'd love to something like that the next time "X rewritten in rust" etc gets to the front page of hacker news. A re-write in of itself tells me nothing.
      - steveklabnik 10y ago
        "Why is this posted here" is not really constructive criticism, because again, this post isn't written for a broader audience, it just happened to be posted here. Every single project blog isn't going to re-iterate every single detail just in case it takes off with a broader audience. I do agree that that post is pretty great; I loved the series. But it's trying to accomplish something different than this post is.
      - Manishearth 10y ago
        What are you criticizing here? You're ultimately criticizing the HN community for upvoting a topic you're not interested in, which IMO is absurd, you're telling people what to be interested in. Either that, or you're criticizing the blog post author for not covering all audiences, which is also absur, folks are allowed to target audiences. This isn't really constructive. Like Steve said, this post wasn't written for a general audience. A Rustacean will read that post and will be very happy to know that they can do certain things using pure Rust libraries. That was the audience of the post, the post makes total sense in that context, and has inherent value in that context. It got shared more widely, and HN seems to like it, which means that possibly folks who weren't the original intended audience are reading it, which is okay too, just that they may not find it that interesting.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      For example, I do care, even if I don't use Rust professionally, because in the future those native libraries that I actually use in Java and .NET, might eventually be rewritten in Rust, thus making our clients enjoy a more safer stack.
  - deskamess 10y ago
    I would have trouble justifying a rewrite in a new language for my job if it provided little or no benefits. However, if something can be improved there is no reason to not improve it, if that is what the goal is. Perhaps changing the source language integrates it better into their ecosystem. It may not work, be justifiable, or have inherent value for you or me, but it works for them. To each their own. It is possible a rewrite in F# could help you, down the road, to add features faster than in C#. This could be a benefit to your users (shiny new useful feature) and management (revenue). So the discussion for moving to a new X involves showing benefit from the perspective of the company and not our personal wants. How do you mitigate risk? Perhaps start with internal tools, where you have to mimic a lot of the real business objects, and validate speed of feature (for the tools) development. You will get familiarity with your data and F#, independent of the user facing production code and come up with a better understanding of risk.

steveklabnik 10y ago

There is already a top-level comment asking this question, with a few replies https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13351066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13351066

lacampbell 10y ago
My job right now is working on a C# codebase. I'd love to re-write everything in F#. I feel like it's higher level, less prone to error, and would make the codebase much smaller. The thing is - no one is going to be impressed if they hear it's been re-written in F# because I assume doing so is going to make the software easier to maintain, easier to extend and more reliable. Not management, not users, no-one. Now, if I did the re-write and LOC went down by half, or performance improved, or it fixed a lot of bugs, or I was able to add features in much more quickly because abstractions were tighter and easier to create and the compiler was able to check more constraints for me - then people might take notice. There is, however, no inherent value in the source language being changed in itself.
- steveklabnik 10y ago
  That's what makes blog posts like this tricky: this post is one for the project itself, which means that its audience is already for people who know what the project is, etc. Someone posted it on HN, and it got upvotes, so it gets to a broader audience, who may not inherently know these kinds of things, or not care. So your point here is valid, that is, "as someone _not_ in that audience, why should I care?" That's what the other thread, with its replies, is getting at. Which is why I pointed to you to it. It's possible as well, of course, that maybe that _still_ means this doesn't matter to you. Which is also expected; nobody is going to like every thread on HN. That's why the guidelines[1] have the section of "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site." And it gives you something to do instead: " If you think a story is spam or off-topic, flag it by clicking on its 'flag' link." And beyond that, you could just skip this thread and read any of the other 29 posts on the front page. That's how I usually handle posts that I don't have any particular interest in. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - lacampbell 10y ago
    Constructive criticism is nothing to shy away from or be defensive about. Having criticism for something doesn't mean I think it's spam or off topic. Again, for an example of a language X-to-language-Y rewrite story with some substance, that did a lot to boost the image of the language in many peoples eyes, see: http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/06/06/python-to-ocaml-retrospective/ http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/06/06/python-to-ocaml-ret... I'd love to something like that the next time "X rewritten in rust" etc gets to the front page of hacker news. A re-write in of itself tells me nothing.
    - steveklabnik 10y ago
      "Why is this posted here" is not really constructive criticism, because again, this post isn't written for a broader audience, it just happened to be posted here. Every single project blog isn't going to re-iterate every single detail just in case it takes off with a broader audience. I do agree that that post is pretty great; I loved the series. But it's trying to accomplish something different than this post is.
    - Manishearth 10y ago
      What are you criticizing here? You're ultimately criticizing the HN community for upvoting a topic you're not interested in, which IMO is absurd, you're telling people what to be interested in. Either that, or you're criticizing the blog post author for not covering all audiences, which is also absur, folks are allowed to target audiences. This isn't really constructive. Like Steve said, this post wasn't written for a general audience. A Rustacean will read that post and will be very happy to know that they can do certain things using pure Rust libraries. That was the audience of the post, the post makes total sense in that context, and has inherent value in that context. It got shared more widely, and HN seems to like it, which means that possibly folks who weren't the original intended audience are reading it, which is okay too, just that they may not find it that interesting.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    For example, I do care, even if I don't use Rust professionally, because in the future those native libraries that I actually use in Java and .NET, might eventually be rewritten in Rust, thus making our clients enjoy a more safer stack.
- deskamess 10y ago
  I would have trouble justifying a rewrite in a new language for my job if it provided little or no benefits. However, if something can be improved there is no reason to not improve it, if that is what the goal is. Perhaps changing the source language integrates it better into their ecosystem. It may not work, be justifiable, or have inherent value for you or me, but it works for them. To each their own. It is possible a rewrite in F# could help you, down the road, to add features faster than in C#. This could be a benefit to your users (shiny new useful feature) and management (revenue). So the discussion for moving to a new X involves showing benefit from the perspective of the company and not our personal wants. How do you mitigate risk? Perhaps start with internal tools, where you have to mimic a lot of the real business objects, and validate speed of feature (for the tools) development. You will get familiarity with your data and F#, independent of the user facing production code and come up with a better understanding of risk.