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I’m not sure where your perception is coming from. Rust and Scala are more functional than they are OOP. Rust for example uses Hindley-Milner type inference, pu

by tbenst 8y ago

I’m not sure where your perception is coming from. Rust and Scala are more functional than they are OOP. Rust for example uses Hindley-Milner type inference, putting it squarely in the functional camp. And Scala is highly functional as well, considering its use of higher order functions and monads.

tom_mellior 8y ago
> Rust for example uses Hindley-Milner type inference, putting it squarely in the functional camp. That's not a very good way to characterize functional programming languages. Obviously you can do functional programming without type inference (see Lisp), and type inference is similarly applicable to non-functional languages (see OCaml's purely imperative sublanguage). Also, as far as I can tell, Rust uses (a modification of) the Hindley-Milner algorithm to infer lifetimes, not types. As languages in the functional camp typically don't have lifetimes, this argument is a bit strange.
- ehsanu1 8y ago
  Rust uses Hindley-Milner to infer types in general, but there is a conscious decision to require explicit types in function signatures etc. Also, lifetimes are part of all rust's types, they are just usually elided since it would be pretty verbose and unhelpful to always write them out.
  - tom_mellior 8y ago
    > Rust uses Hindley-Milner to infer types in general True, I had forgotten that you can just write let foo = bar. (Not a regular Rust user.)
- tbenst 8y ago
  By reference to HM, I mean to illustrate that Rust has fundamental similarities to the typed lambda calculus, which has been done more formally by Rust Belt. Additionally, traits in rust are highly similar to type classes in, say, Haskell. Describing rust as a functional language is reasonable, see eg http://science.raphael.poss.name/rust-for-functional-programmers.html http://science.raphael.poss.name/rust-for-functional-program...

by tbenst 8y ago

tom_mellior 8y ago

> Rust for example uses Hindley-Milner type inference, putting it squarely in the functional camp. That's not a very good way to characterize functional programming languages. Obviously you can do functional programming without type inference (see Lisp), and type inference is similarly applicable to non-functional languages (see OCaml's purely imperative sublanguage). Also, as far as I can tell, Rust uses (a modification of) the Hindley-Milner algorithm to infer lifetimes, not types. As languages in the functional camp typically don't have lifetimes, this argument is a bit strange.

ehsanu1 8y ago
Rust uses Hindley-Milner to infer types in general, but there is a conscious decision to require explicit types in function signatures etc. Also, lifetimes are part of all rust's types, they are just usually elided since it would be pretty verbose and unhelpful to always write them out.
- tom_mellior 8y ago
  > Rust uses Hindley-Milner to infer types in general True, I had forgotten that you can just write let foo = bar. (Not a regular Rust user.)
tbenst 8y ago
By reference to HM, I mean to illustrate that Rust has fundamental similarities to the typed lambda calculus, which has been done more formally by Rust Belt. Additionally, traits in rust are highly similar to type classes in, say, Haskell. Describing rust as a functional language is reasonable, see eg http://science.raphael.poss.name/rust-for-functional-programmers.html http://science.raphael.poss.name/rust-for-functional-program...