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Limiting to relatively well-known general-purpose languages I've used in commercial system development: Haskell, Scheme, OCaml, SML, Rust, Typescript, Smalltal

Limiting to relatively well-known general-purpose languages I've used in commercial system development: Haskell, Scheme, OCaml, SML, Rust, Typescript, Smalltalk, Java, Scala, Common Lisp, Kotlin, C, C++, C#, Javascript, Forth, Delphi/Object Pascal, Turbo Pascal, Python, BASIC (various flavors), Fortran. How about you?

nequo 3y ago
What was your commercial application for SML?
- antonvs 3y ago
  We developed the definitional model of a financial instrument modeling and simulation system in SML. The system included a DSL for specifying instrument models, so part of what the SML implementation did was act as a denotational semantics for that language. The intent was never to deploy it using SML, it was to flesh out and formalize the design, and act as a specification for development of the full system. The system was designed to run on a cluster long before the Kubernetes days, and so had to deal with many of the distribution, scaling, and concurrency issues itself, in addition to its business logic. One of the experiences I had while working on that system was that at the time, I was reading "Monad Transformers and Modular Interpreters" - a seminal paper by Liang, Hudak, and Jones - and I thought I could probably quite easily implement the paper's approach using ML parameterized modules, instead of the Haskell typeclasses used in the paper. I tried it, and was soon disabused of that notion. Partly as a result of that, we wrote the distributed simulation engine for a later version of the system in Haskell.
IshKebab 3y ago
I'd probably go Rust, Typescript, C++, Go, Java, OCaml, Python, Javascript, Matlab, PHP, SystemVerilog, CMake, C, Bash Ok I will make this site. :)
- antonvs 3y ago
  Oh I left PHP and Go out of my list, my subconscious blocked them out of existence. They'd be near the bottom anyway. I suppose Go with polymorphic types might be worth another look, but before that it was dead to me.
  - Patrickmi 3y ago
    A Subconscious that doesn’t want to admit it, not every “good language” makes it to the next round
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    I feel like Go is a so-so language with amazing infrastructure. How many other languages come with built in easy cross compilation, fuzzing, PGO, etc? It is really unsurpassed in that regard, which is probably partly why it is so popular in DevOps. If only the language was a bit better... It's definitely not a bad language like PHP though.

nequo 3y ago

What was your commercial application for SML?

antonvs 3y ago
We developed the definitional model of a financial instrument modeling and simulation system in SML. The system included a DSL for specifying instrument models, so part of what the SML implementation did was act as a denotational semantics for that language. The intent was never to deploy it using SML, it was to flesh out and formalize the design, and act as a specification for development of the full system. The system was designed to run on a cluster long before the Kubernetes days, and so had to deal with many of the distribution, scaling, and concurrency issues itself, in addition to its business logic. One of the experiences I had while working on that system was that at the time, I was reading "Monad Transformers and Modular Interpreters" - a seminal paper by Liang, Hudak, and Jones - and I thought I could probably quite easily implement the paper's approach using ML parameterized modules, instead of the Haskell typeclasses used in the paper. I tried it, and was soon disabused of that notion. Partly as a result of that, we wrote the distributed simulation engine for a later version of the system in Haskell.

IshKebab 3y ago

I'd probably go Rust, Typescript, C++, Go, Java, OCaml, Python, Javascript, Matlab, PHP, SystemVerilog, CMake, C, Bash Ok I will make this site. :)

antonvs 3y ago
Oh I left PHP and Go out of my list, my subconscious blocked them out of existence. They'd be near the bottom anyway. I suppose Go with polymorphic types might be worth another look, but before that it was dead to me.
- Patrickmi 3y ago
  A Subconscious that doesn’t want to admit it, not every “good language” makes it to the next round
- IshKebab 3y ago
  I feel like Go is a so-so language with amazing infrastructure. How many other languages come with built in easy cross compilation, fuzzing, PGO, etc? It is really unsurpassed in that regard, which is probably partly why it is so popular in DevOps. If only the language was a bit better... It's definitely not a bad language like PHP though.