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The more a language or paradigm is touted as some amazing revelation by a small group of people, the less likely I am to like it. Rust, Julia, Haskell, pure fun

by jstx1 5y ago

The more a language or paradigm is touted as some amazing revelation by a small group of people, the less likely I am to like it. Rust, Julia, Haskell, pure functional programming, lisp-for-lisp's sake etc. I develop an instant negative reaction to what looks like a cult from the outside.

Jtsummers 5y ago
You don't even learn them enough to be able to articulate an argument against them? You just reject them outright?
- jstx1 5y ago
  I've played around with each of them. I'm not criticising them technically - they all have great aspects and can teach you a lot even if I think on the whole they're overrated. My reaction to the communities that they have makes me less likely to engage more with each of the languages. I also know that some of these languages have very well regarded communities - that's why this is my response to OP's question.
- armchairhacker 5y ago
  I’ve used Haskell and Racket (lisp), and while they’re great for learning fun new ways of coding and very specific use-cases, they’re terrible general-purpose languages. I’ve also used Julia, albeit less, but i don’t really see the “amazing-ness” of it. Although I come from a typed-languages background with a good IDE, so I can definitely see how it’s amazing to someone coming from Python or R. Rust honestly is IMO a great language and a huge step from C++. But again, it’s not the end-all, I still usually pick Java / Kotlin or something else unless performance really matters.
  - nextos 5y ago
    Julia is great because it's fast and you can develop everything in a single language. Take PyTorch or TensorFlow for example. They are hard to understand because they are a mix of C++ and Python. Whereas Flux.jl is a pure Julia library and performance is comparable. There are even efforts to build a pure BLAS replacement in Julia, and performance is comparable to FORTRAN. If you are into scientific computing, this is amazing because it lets you operate at a much higher level, close to mathematics.

by jstx1 5y ago

Jtsummers 5y ago

You don't even learn them enough to be able to articulate an argument against them? You just reject them outright?

jstx1 5y ago
I've played around with each of them. I'm not criticising them technically - they all have great aspects and can teach you a lot even if I think on the whole they're overrated. My reaction to the communities that they have makes me less likely to engage more with each of the languages. I also know that some of these languages have very well regarded communities - that's why this is my response to OP's question.
armchairhacker 5y ago
I’ve used Haskell and Racket (lisp), and while they’re great for learning fun new ways of coding and very specific use-cases, they’re terrible general-purpose languages. I’ve also used Julia, albeit less, but i don’t really see the “amazing-ness” of it. Although I come from a typed-languages background with a good IDE, so I can definitely see how it’s amazing to someone coming from Python or R. Rust honestly is IMO a great language and a huge step from C++. But again, it’s not the end-all, I still usually pick Java / Kotlin or something else unless performance really matters.
- nextos 5y ago
  Julia is great because it's fast and you can develop everything in a single language. Take PyTorch or TensorFlow for example. They are hard to understand because they are a mix of C++ and Python. Whereas Flux.jl is a pure Julia library and performance is comparable. There are even efforts to build a pure BLAS replacement in Julia, and performance is comparable to FORTRAN. If you are into scientific computing, this is amazing because it lets you operate at a much higher level, close to mathematics.