6 ms·

Future of our industry? Such languages are popular and suited to certain types of projects and solutions certainly. Particularly for systems in computing, and i

by aryehof 10y ago

Future of our industry? Such languages are popular and suited to certain types of projects and solutions certainly. Particularly for systems in computing, and information and data science. However, for complex representational systems, including both transactional and continuous systems in business, commerce and industry, other languages and paradigms can remain better suited.

KurtMueller 10y ago
> However, for complex representational systems, including both transactional and continuous systems in business, commerce and industry, other languages and paradigms can remain better suited. Hello. Respectfully, what is a complex representational system? Why are other languages/paradigms better suited over a language like F#?
- twblalock 10y ago
  > Respectfully, what is a complex representational system? A database is one example. A database is also global mutable state for the programs that write to it, and that significantly compromises the advantages of using functional programming languages for such programs. You might start with some nice pure functional code, but the database adds massive side effects.
  - yawaramin 10y ago
    Actually, the benefits of pure functional programming are even more clearly exposed if you're doing complex IO operations like disk access and mutability. The ability to capture the effectful operations (read a table, write a row) as statically-typed action containers is invaluable because it lets you sequence the effects in a correct order with very little effort.
  - staticassertion 10y ago
    This is the #1 misconception I see surrounding pure functional programming - that once you run into mutable state, you run into problems. It is entirely the opposite. PFP exposes the murky aspects of mutability, provides abstractions around it, and ensures that you're not tripping over yourself in regards to mutability.
  - jpalomaki 10y ago
    Maybe we should get rid of databases (or limit them to reporting). Back in the days they were mandatory since memory was expensive and you simply had to access stuff from disk and needed something that made it reasonably efficient. Now memory is so cheap and for quite many business applications it would be feasible to keep everything in memory. SSDs with GB/s level read speeds would enable restoring the stuff back to memory in reasonable time in case the cluster goes down. I think the whole database thing also caused major issues on the object oriented side and actually stopped people from really using OO (or getting benefits out of it). Instead of building intelligent and smart objects it is easy to end up with objects that are just containers for data. Probably there has been thoughts on how to do this, one old project I remember is Prevayler[1]. [1] http://prevayler.org/ http://prevayler.org/
    - olavk 10y ago
      Persistent objects does not mean you get rid of the database. It just means the database is a lot harder to query.
      - throwawayish 10y ago
        I disagree with both of you. SQL and ORM are a superb fit for a great many applications, incidentally a large share of real world applications. The four-letter abbrev. CRUD comes to mind, as well as reporting. Most kinds of NoSQL remove some benefits of the relational model while not really giving you the benefits of object persistence. I never felt a great need to use it; since quite some of these databases also had all sorts of issues that not exactly endeared trust for serious applications -- I'm not working on software where that's an OK thing to have (though for others it might be an acceptable tradeoff). The real deal persistent object databases are a completely different beast from both NoSQL and relational models (only some NoSQL concepts like explicit / application-level indexing carry over). Two important things to note about these: 1.) There are not many of them 2.) Properly using them already requires proper OO technique. Failing 2.) will make it an unmaintainable mess. Certain kinds of applications benefit greatly from these, and there they also tend to perform better in both developer experience and efficiency as well as application performance than forcing a huge impedance mismatch down the throat of an ORM -- which pretty much always means that the underlying relational DB is used in very anti-patternish ways, resulting in poor performance regardless how good the DB actually is.
- aryehof 10y ago
  > "What is a complex representational system" 1. Representational systems a. Transactional systems [1], based around actions that need to be recorded, typically for commercial or legal reasons, like software used to record your purchases, payments, reservations, participation, interactions, obligations, results, commitments, plans, and significant events. b. Non-transactional continuous systems, like software controlling an elevator, warehouse conveyor system, or a vehicle engine management system. See http://aryehoffman.com/entry/project-types http://aryehoffman.com/entry/project-types
  - yawaramin 10y ago
    The Tezos project is writing a new safety-focused blockchain implementation in OCaml. Would you classify that as a representational system or otherwise?
    - aryehof 10y ago
      I don't know anything about Tezos or blockchain implementations sorry, but I suspect that it is primarily focused on the processing of data, rather than the modeling of the concepts in a domain – a specific area of activity or knowledge. As such it is more of a Type 2B project - "Information, data science and analysis projects, systems often focused on the processing of data." (http://aryehoffman.com/entry/project-types http://aryehoffman.com/entry/project-types)
      - willtim 10y ago
        Most mainstream languages don't even have sum types, but have to encode them via other means (enums, tags, inheritance). They are not necessarily the best choice for modelling data, just your preferred choice.
      - yawaramin 10y ago
        From the description, 2(b) sounds like a strict superset of 1(a). In fact, it sounds like the most generic possible description of an IT system. I mean, what computer system is not focused on the processing of data? Anyway, I asked you about a blockchain technology because it fits perfectly into your description of a representational technology. In fact it's a breakthrough in the space, and I'm finding it hard to believe that an IT professional doesn't have even a basic idea about about it.
willtim 10y ago
There's not enough detail here to really comment. I can say that Haskell has the best software transactional memory implementation out there, thanks to purity and controlled side-effects. Haskell's explicit handling of state also helps provenance and keeping state managed / in the database.

by aryehof 10y ago

KurtMueller 10y ago

> However, for complex representational systems, including both transactional and continuous systems in business, commerce and industry, other languages and paradigms can remain better suited. Hello. Respectfully, what is a complex representational system? Why are other languages/paradigms better suited over a language like F#?

twblalock 10y ago
> Respectfully, what is a complex representational system? A database is one example. A database is also global mutable state for the programs that write to it, and that significantly compromises the advantages of using functional programming languages for such programs. You might start with some nice pure functional code, but the database adds massive side effects.
- yawaramin 10y ago
  Actually, the benefits of pure functional programming are even more clearly exposed if you're doing complex IO operations like disk access and mutability. The ability to capture the effectful operations (read a table, write a row) as statically-typed action containers is invaluable because it lets you sequence the effects in a correct order with very little effort.
- staticassertion 10y ago
  This is the #1 misconception I see surrounding pure functional programming - that once you run into mutable state, you run into problems. It is entirely the opposite. PFP exposes the murky aspects of mutability, provides abstractions around it, and ensures that you're not tripping over yourself in regards to mutability.
- jpalomaki 10y ago
  Maybe we should get rid of databases (or limit them to reporting). Back in the days they were mandatory since memory was expensive and you simply had to access stuff from disk and needed something that made it reasonably efficient. Now memory is so cheap and for quite many business applications it would be feasible to keep everything in memory. SSDs with GB/s level read speeds would enable restoring the stuff back to memory in reasonable time in case the cluster goes down. I think the whole database thing also caused major issues on the object oriented side and actually stopped people from really using OO (or getting benefits out of it). Instead of building intelligent and smart objects it is easy to end up with objects that are just containers for data. Probably there has been thoughts on how to do this, one old project I remember is Prevayler[1]. [1] http://prevayler.org/ http://prevayler.org/
  - olavk 10y ago
    Persistent objects does not mean you get rid of the database. It just means the database is a lot harder to query.
    - throwawayish 10y ago
      I disagree with both of you. SQL and ORM are a superb fit for a great many applications, incidentally a large share of real world applications. The four-letter abbrev. CRUD comes to mind, as well as reporting. Most kinds of NoSQL remove some benefits of the relational model while not really giving you the benefits of object persistence. I never felt a great need to use it; since quite some of these databases also had all sorts of issues that not exactly endeared trust for serious applications -- I'm not working on software where that's an OK thing to have (though for others it might be an acceptable tradeoff). The real deal persistent object databases are a completely different beast from both NoSQL and relational models (only some NoSQL concepts like explicit / application-level indexing carry over). Two important things to note about these: 1.) There are not many of them 2.) Properly using them already requires proper OO technique. Failing 2.) will make it an unmaintainable mess. Certain kinds of applications benefit greatly from these, and there they also tend to perform better in both developer experience and efficiency as well as application performance than forcing a huge impedance mismatch down the throat of an ORM -- which pretty much always means that the underlying relational DB is used in very anti-patternish ways, resulting in poor performance regardless how good the DB actually is.
aryehof 10y ago
> "What is a complex representational system" 1. Representational systems a. Transactional systems [1], based around actions that need to be recorded, typically for commercial or legal reasons, like software used to record your purchases, payments, reservations, participation, interactions, obligations, results, commitments, plans, and significant events. b. Non-transactional continuous systems, like software controlling an elevator, warehouse conveyor system, or a vehicle engine management system. See http://aryehoffman.com/entry/project-types http://aryehoffman.com/entry/project-types
- yawaramin 10y ago
  The Tezos project is writing a new safety-focused blockchain implementation in OCaml. Would you classify that as a representational system or otherwise?
  - aryehof 10y ago
    I don't know anything about Tezos or blockchain implementations sorry, but I suspect that it is primarily focused on the processing of data, rather than the modeling of the concepts in a domain – a specific area of activity or knowledge. As such it is more of a Type 2B project - "Information, data science and analysis projects, systems often focused on the processing of data." (http://aryehoffman.com/entry/project-types http://aryehoffman.com/entry/project-types)
    - willtim 10y ago
      Most mainstream languages don't even have sum types, but have to encode them via other means (enums, tags, inheritance). They are not necessarily the best choice for modelling data, just your preferred choice.
    - yawaramin 10y ago
      From the description, 2(b) sounds like a strict superset of 1(a). In fact, it sounds like the most generic possible description of an IT system. I mean, what computer system is not focused on the processing of data? Anyway, I asked you about a blockchain technology because it fits perfectly into your description of a representational technology. In fact it's a breakthrough in the space, and I'm finding it hard to believe that an IT professional doesn't have even a basic idea about about it.

willtim 10y ago

There's not enough detail here to really comment. I can say that Haskell has the best software transactional memory implementation out there, thanks to purity and controlled side-effects. Haskell's explicit handling of state also helps provenance and keeping state managed / in the database.