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I used to work at an OCaml company and it wasn't nearly as much of an issue as one might predict. You can (it turns out) build a very successful business even i

by wyager 5y ago

I used to work at an OCaml company and it wasn't nearly as much of an issue as one might predict. You can (it turns out) build a very successful business even if there aren't a lot of existing libraries, or if the language lacks certain basic features like native multithreading (same with Python of course). I don't have a great model for why this isn't devastatingly expensive, but it's probably some combination of * Most existing libraries are kind of bad anyway so you're not missing out much by not using them * If you write everything yourself you get system expertise "for free", and gaining expertise in something that already exists is hard * You can tailor everything to your business requirements * Writing libraries is "fun work" so it's easier to be productive while doing it

Zababa 5y ago
That's interesting, thanks for sharing your experience. Sometimes I wonder how much interesting experience I miss by mostly using things people already built. Sure, if you're just trying to get something done it's probably faster, but on the other hand spending more time gives you experience.
pbiggar 5y ago
I don't agree with this at all. While it's true that there are lots of bad libraries and many libraries are easy, you really isolate yourself from the broader ecosystem by doing this. Vendors and 3rd party solutions are now much harder to use, and when you use them you'll probably only use them at a surface level instead of using all the features. And some things are so mature and vast you don't have a chance of building them yourself. If what you are doing can be done well in very mature ecosystems like React or PyTorch, the effort to recreate them will dwarf the time spend on important work.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  I know plenty of companies not using third parties for security or ideological reasons. Code is code: both models (3rd party vs no 3rd party) can work and the time spent reinventing the wheel is not necessarily business breaking.
- Zababa 5y ago
  > If what you are doing can be done well in very mature ecosystems like React or PyTorch, the effort to recreate them will dwarf the time spend on important work. Sometimes that's effort that's not really necessary. At work we had a team build a dashboard with React and a few graphs recently. It clocks at 2000 unique dependencies. That's not a typo, it's two thousands dependencies for a few graphs. Reimplementing all of that would take many man-years of work, but I think it wouldn't be necessary in the first place. Chart.js doesn't use any runtime dependencies, and could probably fill most of our needs. Chart.js is 50k of Javascript, which is a lot but probably more than we need. I don't know how much time it would take to make a reimplementation to have the API we need, but I think it's doable. Why would we want to do that? Because those 2000 dependencies are a liability. Last time I checked 165 were looking for funding. It would be easy to imagine a malicious actor paying a few people to contribute to low profile but widely used JS libraries, and take over the maintenance when the original maintainer becomes tired. I don't know if this is a worse liability than developing our own chart library. I don't know much about security and the tradeoff involved. All of that to say, isolation from the broader ecosystem may be a good thing.
  - ithrow 5y ago
    I guess you mean 2000 dev dependencies because for production that would be crazy.
    - Zababa 5y ago
      I'll have to check but at least half of those are for production.
brundolf 5y ago
It would probably depend a lot on what you're building Though I think the "fun work" point is really interesting and worth a broader discussion
ch4s3 5y ago
The "for free" is doing a lot of work there! :) I've been there, and you do develop the valuable human capital, but it costs time and salary. That said, you're right it is fun, and people like doing it so its good to keep your work mixed up and you team motivated. It's a good lever to pull IMHO, but not always.
- nine_k 5y ago
  Yes, it's not free in the sense that this is paid developer time, and also a delay before actual production deployment. As long as learning the basics of a 3rd-party library takes a relatively short time, those who use it have an advantage: they ship faster. Certainly mastering it may take as long as writing one's own. But you can do that while writing more production code and shipping features. Also, you get improvements made by other people for free (because likely you're using an OSS library anyway).
hardwaregeek 5y ago
I think Jane Street is a big exception. It's like when PG espouses lisp. Back in the 90's[1] language ecosystems were very sparse. An ecosystem was a few big libraries and a syntax highlighter. Now stuff like IDEs, linting, packages, etc. have made people's standards quite high for ecosystems. On the flip side, back in the day languages like OCaml and Lisp had stuff other languages could only dream about. Functions as arguments! Macros! Type inference! But now, barring macros, these features are all in mainstream languages. If you were to do a similar company now, you'd have to recruit people who still write code like in the 90's: emacs/vim hackers who can write their own libraries and don't need no stinking IDE. Except you now have a significantly smaller advantage because a lot of the languages have caught up and while your god tier programmers can write their own custom serialization library, that's still more developer time than using serde. Which is why a lot of people are moving to Rust I suppose. You still get the hip factor but responsibly. It's the Foo Fighters of languages. Cool, but not irresponsible. [1]: I was in a very famous tv show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBw-Z8ULwcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBw-Z8ULwcc
- Zababa 5y ago
  The big difference between Rust and OCaml is that a company the size of Jane Street can influence OCaml development, while it takes one the size of Amazon (according to the recent accusations) to do the same with Rust. I think OCaml has one of those "ancient" communities that seem to value independence more than consensus. Rust is very hard to build without cargo, OCaml works fine with make or dune. I'm not sure if focusing on independence is the right tradeoff for most companies, but I can see some cases where it might be. > If you were to do a similar company now, you'd have to recruit people who still write code like in the 90's: emacs/vim hackers who can write their own libraries and don't need no stinking IDE. IDE support is getting there with OCaml. In VSCode, it's not as good as TypeScript but it's usable. > Except you now have a significantly smaller advantage because a lot of the languages have caught up and while your god tier programmers can write their own custom serialization library, that's still more developer time than using serde. There are a few libraries that you can use. Serde also tends to make the already long compilation time blow up.
- wyager 5y ago
chillfox 5y ago
Multi-threading can often be handed off to the OS in the form of just run more processes. So in most cases there is really no need for the language to handle it.
- wyager 5y ago
  There isn't really a need for anything, which is kind of the point. You can use a random language that's missing a ton of functionality and you can probably make it work.
- throw868788 5y ago
  Its still nice to have shared memory especially in a functional language where due to lots more immutability it isn't as big of a price (i.e. more concurrency safe). Especially if your sharing in-memory caches and the like. I've seen this save tons of dollars in cloud setups (100,000's) in my career in more than one place. Safe multi-threading was marketed as part of the advantage of functional programming to many people; which IMO why I find it strange that OcAML didn't have it for so long. Lightweight threads (e.g. Tasks, Channels, etc) use less system resources than processes as well. You can do anything with anything but you usually pay some price of inefficiency to do so. That may be small, but sometimes it is large enough to matter.
  - scns 5y ago
    It took so long because they wanted to ensure the performance OCaml is known for.
    - throw868788 5y ago
      Agreed; especially since it didn't have it originally. I'm sure some compromises were made to do it in a way that fits into the execution model/doesn't cause regressions to older code. They are both good languages for sure which makes sense because one is derived from the other. F# through itself and .NET has had the equivalent functionality for many years however (Threads, Tasks, Async's, Channel libraries, etc) being the one of the first languages (before C#) to have an Async construct. I would imagine it would take some time I think for OcAML's ecosystem to catch up API wise with this where it matters for application development. Looking at OcAML's recent release notes I see work to slowly migrate multicore into OcAML but the feature itself hasn't landed yet? Think it comes in 5.0. I have to say though F# performance is quite good too those days from working/dabbling with both languages + the ecosystem is bigger. I would like to see/understand where the OcAML perf advantage is there is any for evaluation. The CLR has really good performance these days; its has features to optimise some things (e.g. value types make a big difference to some data structures, hot loops vs the JVM) from my experience especially if you don't allow Unsafe code for many algo's/data structures. For example I just looked at the benchmarks game (I know has its problems including bad contributed implementations for niche ecosystems) but it shows .NET Core (and therefore F#) performance is within the same scale as OcAML at times beating it (https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/fsharp.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...).
mbrodersen 5y ago
My experience as well. I worked in industries (Games development) where no open-source or proprietary solutions existed for what we needed. So we built it ourselves. It wasn’t that hard and we never had problems with it because it did 100% exactly what we needed and nothing else. If any new feature was needed we simply added it. I would routinely get an ask from a programmer, artist, musician or game designer and would have it implemented and a new version ready for them within a day or two. The productivity gains were immense.

by wyager 5y ago

Zababa 5y ago

That's interesting, thanks for sharing your experience. Sometimes I wonder how much interesting experience I miss by mostly using things people already built. Sure, if you're just trying to get something done it's probably faster, but on the other hand spending more time gives you experience.

pbiggar 5y ago

I don't agree with this at all. While it's true that there are lots of bad libraries and many libraries are easy, you really isolate yourself from the broader ecosystem by doing this. Vendors and 3rd party solutions are now much harder to use, and when you use them you'll probably only use them at a surface level instead of using all the features. And some things are so mature and vast you don't have a chance of building them yourself. If what you are doing can be done well in very mature ecosystems like React or PyTorch, the effort to recreate them will dwarf the time spend on important work.

jokethrowaway 5y ago
I know plenty of companies not using third parties for security or ideological reasons. Code is code: both models (3rd party vs no 3rd party) can work and the time spent reinventing the wheel is not necessarily business breaking.
Zababa 5y ago
> If what you are doing can be done well in very mature ecosystems like React or PyTorch, the effort to recreate them will dwarf the time spend on important work. Sometimes that's effort that's not really necessary. At work we had a team build a dashboard with React and a few graphs recently. It clocks at 2000 unique dependencies. That's not a typo, it's two thousands dependencies for a few graphs. Reimplementing all of that would take many man-years of work, but I think it wouldn't be necessary in the first place. Chart.js doesn't use any runtime dependencies, and could probably fill most of our needs. Chart.js is 50k of Javascript, which is a lot but probably more than we need. I don't know how much time it would take to make a reimplementation to have the API we need, but I think it's doable. Why would we want to do that? Because those 2000 dependencies are a liability. Last time I checked 165 were looking for funding. It would be easy to imagine a malicious actor paying a few people to contribute to low profile but widely used JS libraries, and take over the maintenance when the original maintainer becomes tired. I don't know if this is a worse liability than developing our own chart library. I don't know much about security and the tradeoff involved. All of that to say, isolation from the broader ecosystem may be a good thing.
- ithrow 5y ago
  I guess you mean 2000 dev dependencies because for production that would be crazy.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    I'll have to check but at least half of those are for production.

brundolf 5y ago

It would probably depend a lot on what you're building Though I think the "fun work" point is really interesting and worth a broader discussion

ch4s3 5y ago

The "for free" is doing a lot of work there! :) I've been there, and you do develop the valuable human capital, but it costs time and salary. That said, you're right it is fun, and people like doing it so its good to keep your work mixed up and you team motivated. It's a good lever to pull IMHO, but not always.

nine_k 5y ago
Yes, it's not free in the sense that this is paid developer time, and also a delay before actual production deployment. As long as learning the basics of a 3rd-party library takes a relatively short time, those who use it have an advantage: they ship faster. Certainly mastering it may take as long as writing one's own. But you can do that while writing more production code and shipping features. Also, you get improvements made by other people for free (because likely you're using an OSS library anyway).

hardwaregeek 5y ago

I think Jane Street is a big exception. It's like when PG espouses lisp. Back in the 90's[1] language ecosystems were very sparse. An ecosystem was a few big libraries and a syntax highlighter. Now stuff like IDEs, linting, packages, etc. have made people's standards quite high for ecosystems. On the flip side, back in the day languages like OCaml and Lisp had stuff other languages could only dream about. Functions as arguments! Macros! Type inference! But now, barring macros, these features are all in mainstream languages. If you were to do a similar company now, you'd have to recruit people who still write code like in the 90's: emacs/vim hackers who can write their own libraries and don't need no stinking IDE. Except you now have a significantly smaller advantage because a lot of the languages have caught up and while your god tier programmers can write their own custom serialization library, that's still more developer time than using serde. Which is why a lot of people are moving to Rust I suppose. You still get the hip factor but responsibly. It's the Foo Fighters of languages. Cool, but not irresponsible. [1]: I was in a very famous tv show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBw-Z8ULwcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBw-Z8ULwcc

Zababa 5y ago
The big difference between Rust and OCaml is that a company the size of Jane Street can influence OCaml development, while it takes one the size of Amazon (according to the recent accusations) to do the same with Rust. I think OCaml has one of those "ancient" communities that seem to value independence more than consensus. Rust is very hard to build without cargo, OCaml works fine with make or dune. I'm not sure if focusing on independence is the right tradeoff for most companies, but I can see some cases where it might be. > If you were to do a similar company now, you'd have to recruit people who still write code like in the 90's: emacs/vim hackers who can write their own libraries and don't need no stinking IDE. IDE support is getting there with OCaml. In VSCode, it's not as good as TypeScript but it's usable. > Except you now have a significantly smaller advantage because a lot of the languages have caught up and while your god tier programmers can write their own custom serialization library, that's still more developer time than using serde. There are a few libraries that you can use. Serde also tends to make the already long compilation time blow up.
wyager 5y ago

chillfox 5y ago

Multi-threading can often be handed off to the OS in the form of just run more processes. So in most cases there is really no need for the language to handle it.

wyager 5y ago
There isn't really a need for anything, which is kind of the point. You can use a random language that's missing a ton of functionality and you can probably make it work.
throw868788 5y ago
Its still nice to have shared memory especially in a functional language where due to lots more immutability it isn't as big of a price (i.e. more concurrency safe). Especially if your sharing in-memory caches and the like. I've seen this save tons of dollars in cloud setups (100,000's) in my career in more than one place. Safe multi-threading was marketed as part of the advantage of functional programming to many people; which IMO why I find it strange that OcAML didn't have it for so long. Lightweight threads (e.g. Tasks, Channels, etc) use less system resources than processes as well. You can do anything with anything but you usually pay some price of inefficiency to do so. That may be small, but sometimes it is large enough to matter.
- scns 5y ago
  It took so long because they wanted to ensure the performance OCaml is known for.
  - throw868788 5y ago
    Agreed; especially since it didn't have it originally. I'm sure some compromises were made to do it in a way that fits into the execution model/doesn't cause regressions to older code. They are both good languages for sure which makes sense because one is derived from the other. F# through itself and .NET has had the equivalent functionality for many years however (Threads, Tasks, Async's, Channel libraries, etc) being the one of the first languages (before C#) to have an Async construct. I would imagine it would take some time I think for OcAML's ecosystem to catch up API wise with this where it matters for application development. Looking at OcAML's recent release notes I see work to slowly migrate multicore into OcAML but the feature itself hasn't landed yet? Think it comes in 5.0. I have to say though F# performance is quite good too those days from working/dabbling with both languages + the ecosystem is bigger. I would like to see/understand where the OcAML perf advantage is there is any for evaluation. The CLR has really good performance these days; its has features to optimise some things (e.g. value types make a big difference to some data structures, hot loops vs the JVM) from my experience especially if you don't allow Unsafe code for many algo's/data structures. For example I just looked at the benchmarks game (I know has its problems including bad contributed implementations for niche ecosystems) but it shows .NET Core (and therefore F#) performance is within the same scale as OcAML at times beating it (https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/fsharp.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...).

mbrodersen 5y ago

My experience as well. I worked in industries (Games development) where no open-source or proprietary solutions existed for what we needed. So we built it ourselves. It wasn’t that hard and we never had problems with it because it did 100% exactly what we needed and nothing else. If any new feature was needed we simply added it. I would routinely get an ask from a programmer, artist, musician or game designer and would have it implemented and a new version ready for them within a day or two. The productivity gains were immense.