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Every language that goes all-in on type safety (Haskell, OCaml, F#, Scala) ends up being too hard to actually use in day-to-day programming. But people publicly

by zelly 6y ago

Every language that goes all-in on type safety (Haskell, OCaml, F#, Scala) ends up being too hard to actually use in day-to-day programming. But people publicly say that they prefer it so as to not signal that they themselves find it too difficult. In an ideal world, I'd be writing everything in Coq, but I still live on earth and have deadlines, so I'll "do that some other day". All the code ends up being in some practical language, but when I get a developer survey I'll say I love the type safe hippie language.

thayne 6y ago
I think the difficulty with those languagrs comes more from the pure functional paradigm than type safety. And I do use scala as a day-to-day language. Also, I'm not saying I prefer rust over go after reading some documentation and playing around with toy examples. I've written real code in both, and prefer the rust experience. I think go's main advantage is it is easy to learn. That is a real advantage in some cases (like onboarding new employees/contributors), but for me and many programmers I know it is not a sufficiently compelling reason to give up a more powerful type system.
- teraku 6y ago
  Exactly this! I use Go because it's easy when I sometimes need to provide small binaries to colleagues to help with their day-to-day work. And those are colleagues who don't have a Python environment installed or anything, which I'd be opting for in small "workflow improvement" cases like this. So whip up a small Go program, compile to Windows, and make a colleague happy. But when I build larger codebases with my developer colleagues (or private projects at home) I really prefer Rust as it gives me so much more trust in the code that I might have to maintain for years and where the linecount is not just <200, but actually thousands and thousands.
jhomedall 6y ago
> Every language that goes all-in on type safety (Haskell, OCaml, F#, Scala) ends up being too hard to actually use in day-to-day programming. F# is the most pleasant, practical day-to-day programming language that I have personally used. Scala is also quite nice.

by zelly 6y ago

thayne 6y ago

I think the difficulty with those languagrs comes more from the pure functional paradigm than type safety. And I do use scala as a day-to-day language. Also, I'm not saying I prefer rust over go after reading some documentation and playing around with toy examples. I've written real code in both, and prefer the rust experience. I think go's main advantage is it is easy to learn. That is a real advantage in some cases (like onboarding new employees/contributors), but for me and many programmers I know it is not a sufficiently compelling reason to give up a more powerful type system.

teraku 6y ago
Exactly this! I use Go because it's easy when I sometimes need to provide small binaries to colleagues to help with their day-to-day work. And those are colleagues who don't have a Python environment installed or anything, which I'd be opting for in small "workflow improvement" cases like this. So whip up a small Go program, compile to Windows, and make a colleague happy. But when I build larger codebases with my developer colleagues (or private projects at home) I really prefer Rust as it gives me so much more trust in the code that I might have to maintain for years and where the linecount is not just <200, but actually thousands and thousands.

jhomedall 6y ago

> Every language that goes all-in on type safety (Haskell, OCaml, F#, Scala) ends up being too hard to actually use in day-to-day programming. F# is the most pleasant, practical day-to-day programming language that I have personally used. Scala is also quite nice.