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I avidly follow descendants of Scheme and Haskell (I figured out for example how to build Idris native on an M1 Mac), and I plan to follow Ante. I just spent $5

I avidly follow descendants of Scheme and Haskell (I figured out for example how to build Idris native on an M1 Mac), and I plan to follow Ante. I just spent $5k of lunch money on an M1 Ultra Mac Studio, to use as a math compute server. How do I keep it busy? Haskell. My "Hello world" parallel benchmark, using reverse search to enumerate the 66,960,965,307 atomic lattices on six atoms, took 14 hours in 2009. It now takes four minutes. I'd love to start again with a new, small language. I love Haskell, but it's decades old, and one struggles to work with it without being torn apart by the gravitational tides of the black hole at the center of its galaxy. All jokes aside, Haskell really does reward a PhD in category theory, or the self-taught equivalent later. Functional languages make parallelism easier, and Haskell has put particular effort into this: Adding a dozen lines to a program can keep the 16 performance cores of my Mac Studio running full tilt. I have yet to read any account of how someone else's favorite language makes parallelism easy, that is aware of the comparison with Haskell. If I thought there was a reasonable alternative, I'd jump at trying it. Rust appeals because it replaces GC with modern control of allocation lifetimes. I love how Ante will also explore this. I use cyclic data structures; how one handles this functionally, and how one handles this using reference counting, is exactly the same problem. Parallelism should be the first consideration, designing any new language in 2022. Parallelism is the reason I keep using Haskell, despite newer alternatives. Any language that runs on a single core is a toy. This is a plea!

JoshCole 4y ago
Also have a computer with a ridiculous number of cores (32) that I want to keep busy. I've found Clojure to dominate the ease of parallelism. For problems that are actually stupidly parallel the number of changes to your code is often measured in letters rather than lines. For example, you might change map to pmap or you might change reduce to reducers/reduce and change nothing else but now be fully leveraging all your cores. For problems that aren't stupidly parallel I feel like Clojure shines even more. Most languages didn't implement software transactional memory and encourage it as the default way to work with things that vary over time, but Clojure did. On account of that you can have a not massively parallel algorithm that would be full of tricky lock code in another language and still end up leveraging all your cores by doing something as simple as map or pmap, but not run into horrible issues.
cultofmetatron 4y ago
try elixir! parallelism is child's play on the platform. plus its functional without drowning you in type theory.

JoshCole 4y ago

Also have a computer with a ridiculous number of cores (32) that I want to keep busy. I've found Clojure to dominate the ease of parallelism. For problems that are actually stupidly parallel the number of changes to your code is often measured in letters rather than lines. For example, you might change map to pmap or you might change reduce to reducers/reduce and change nothing else but now be fully leveraging all your cores. For problems that aren't stupidly parallel I feel like Clojure shines even more. Most languages didn't implement software transactional memory and encourage it as the default way to work with things that vary over time, but Clojure did. On account of that you can have a not massively parallel algorithm that would be full of tricky lock code in another language and still end up leveraging all your cores by doing something as simple as map or pmap, but not run into horrible issues.

cultofmetatron 4y ago

try elixir! parallelism is child's play on the platform. plus its functional without drowning you in type theory.