5 ms·

A good list. ML languages push you (kicking and screaming) into the pit of success.

• nnoitra 5y ago
  They're barely used in industry.
  • gpderetta 5y ago
    I wonder why this is the case. Ocaml syntax doesn't seem very arcane, it is not hell-bent on functional purism and pragmatically allows for imperative code. Performance seems quite reasonable. What does it lack that prevented it from gaining wider acceptance? Surely buy-in from a large company was an issue, but even F# hasn't seen any significant uptake. Is it really the lack of curly brackets? That didn't stop Python... Is it just that being labelled 'functional' was a huge stigma for a very long time?
    • dgan 5y ago
      Libraries!!! Python is "batteries included" while OCaml barely has insulation around electrical wires. EDIT: okey that actually maight be a chicken-egg reasonning
    • WastingMyTime89 5y ago
      If Ocaml had been designed in the USA it would have been widely successful. It’s main drawback was being mostly a French project.
      • usrnm 5y ago
        > If Ocaml had been designed in the USA it would have been widely successful I doubt that. There are plenty of American SML dialects and F# is about as American as it gets, but neither of these languages saw any commercial success.
    • kragen 5y ago
      The syntax is not great, the standard library is very sparse, and the error messages from the compiler and interpreter are terrible (and used to be worse). The OCaml team used to treat the native code compiler (ocamlopt) as a second-class citizen, but it's the implementation that matters for performance. Since the end of Dennard scaling about 15 years ago, OCaml's lack of multithreading has also been a pain point, one which is finally starting to improve in the last year or two. I don't think being labeled "functional" was ever a huge stigma. Being labeled "Haskell" is a huge stigma in some circles, but OCaml's never been labeled "Haskell". Until about 10 years ago functional programming didn't become popular enough to have any kind of popular opinion, positive or negative, and the people who knew about it generally thought it would be nice to do more of it. Mostly I think people use a programming language either because they already know it or it's the scripting language for an environment they have to use. Assembly was the scripting language for your CPU, especially in mainframe days. BASIC was the scripting language for personal computers. Visual Basic was the scripting language for WIMPs. VBA was the scripting language for Excel and Word (previously Excel had a table-based macro thing). sh was the scripting language for the Unix filesystem; C was the scripting language for the Unix system call interface, and a nice upgrade from assembly. JS was and is the scripting language for the browser. Lua is the scripting language for WoW, Roblox, and Minetest. Perl was the scripting language of the WWW, then PHP was, or Ruby if what you really want to script is Rails. SQL is the scripting language for your database. Objective-C was the scripting language for NeXTStep; now Swift is. MATLAB was the scripting language for EISPACK and later *PACK and BLAS, though it had some competition from IDL for a while. Now Python is the scripting language for Numpy (and thus BLAS), Matplotlib, and TensorFlow. Only a few popular languages are exceptions to this rule: Fortran, COBOL, C++, Java, R, Pascal, Golang, and C#. OCaml? OCaml is the scripting language of ocamlyacc and Coq. If you write OCaml then it's probably because you like Coq. This may have been a public relations problem in the Anglosphere, especially before same-sex marriage.
      • wawjgreen 5y ago
      • octachron 5y ago
        Why do you think that the native compiler was treated as a second class citizen? This is quite strange take from my point of view. For instance OCaml native compiler was available on the M1 Macs two months after the M1 release. Similarly, all major CPU architectures (x86, ARM, PowerPC, RISC-V, s390x) have been supported for years.
    • chii 5y ago
      It's not that there's stigma, but that it is probably more difficult to think functionally when most programming education teaches imperative methods.
  • asplake 5y ago
    But look at their influence: TypeScript and Rust, not to mention Elm, PureScript and other less mainstream languages
    • tgv 5y ago
      TypeScript is very much a C++ descedant, IMO.
    • darksaints 5y ago
      + Scala
  • marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Even if functional programming itself isn't used, a lot of its patterns are extremely useful even outside of functional programming. Code returning side effects rather than having side effects, for example, is great, and I find myself returning to the principle in a lot of the stuff I design as an architectural principle.
• bmitc 5y ago
  Kicking and screaming? ML dialects, or at least F#, are usually a pleasure.