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“ The language is different from Rust (who could’ve thought that, yeah), but it left a genuinely good impression. It’s straightforward, modern, and blazingly fa

“ The language is different from Rust (who could’ve thought that, yeah), but it left a genuinely good impression. It’s straightforward, modern, and blazingly fast. I believe it has real potential to become the true successor to C. On the other hand, it’s still young, and it shows: the shape of the language itself feels unfinished in places, and I suspect it’ll pick up more of the cooler quality-of-life features and syntax sugar as it matures. As for me, I’d like to keep contributing to the ecosystem, and I will, whenever I come across a project worth building.” Idk I don’t write either well enough to have a hand in this but losing out all of this for more Imperative stuff seems like a step back. “ No functional paradigm Rust is technically an imperative language, but it draws heavily on functional concepts: zero-cost iterators, lazy evaluation, ADTs, pattern matching, monadic types, traits, closures, and so on. Having also spent time with Haskell and Erlang, I’ve become fairly inclined toward the functional style, and it shows in this library. It leans heavily on FP idioms: Monadic error control via combinators like Queryable and related types Monadic-style data types like Data<T> with map, flat_map, reduce, and friends Pure, immutable transformations Combinators over iterators instead of loops Closures for local abstraction Declarative macros as a small embedded DSL Sum types and product types”

api 14d ago
I would say Rust is a functional language that has been hammered into the shape of C++. It also draws heavily on ML. I get why, and it makes it a better fit for its obvious “C++ reimagined, cleaner, and better” niche.
pjmlp 14d ago
Modern and blazing fast, what we lost leaving behind languages like Modula-2 and Object Pascal, having newer generations to think C and C++ were the only compiled languages alternatives to scripting languages.
- touisteur 14d ago
  I miss the years of writing CLI tools, web servers and clients, in Ada (and of course, real-time complex distributed system...). Felt so simple and right and fast and robust. The code is still readable today and maintaining it is a zero effort today. Clean Java without the enterprise BS was a close second in ease of programming - boilerplate be damned. I'm glad NVIDIA found a way to make GPUs programmable and got us out of the shaders tarpit, but did it have to be C++...
  - pjmlp 14d ago
    Also a good one.
- jstimpfle 14d ago
  You repeating this weird strawman take a million times doesn't make it true. Why don't you finally just put out some genuinely interesting projects demonstrating how everybody was doing it wrong, so people can make up their own mind and finally be convinced. There must be some true magic in those languages and platforms you mention, that should offset the pain of writing in upper case and with super long KEYWORDs everywhere, and to offset the cost of switching to a culture that has way less mindshare and way less of a software ecosystem around it. FWIW I've actually worked for 6 months on a large old Delphi project. It was some performance work that, as almost always, mainly required getting the language crap out of the way. In the end I got the job done (100x-1000x speedup) but I wouldn't want to switch back to this ecosystem: Licensing costs, weird language warts there too. A slow moving ecosystem. Ultimately, I just need something that does what I tell it to do, reliably and fast, and that doesn't get in the way.
  - pjmlp 14d ago
    If you don't like, press PgDn.
    - AndrewDucker 14d ago
      People should reply on Hacker News. If you disagree with someone's opinion and you have reasons for doing so then the right thing to do is share them.
      - pjmlp 14d ago
        Sure, except there is a bit of history here, this isn't the first exchange, and I am not bothering to reply back as we aren't going to change opinion on C vs safer languages until we leave this realm. Thus we can keep filling HN with pointless comments or move on.
        jstimpfle 14d ago
        There is plenty history of you repeating the same strawmans literally thousands of times. I've just never seen _anyone_ on HN (or elsewhere for that matter) make such claims?
cosmic_cheese 14d ago
I’m more than a bit out of my depth discussing the topic, but I’m not sure than imperative-dominant languages will ever really go away or that functional-dominant languages will ever become as popular as C and C++. Ugly as they may be, imperative languages seem to be grokked by humans more readily and are more often than not “good enough” for the most part so it’s difficult to see them losing substantial momentum.
- pyrolistical 14d ago
  Until there is a machine that is natively functional, there is always going to an incentive to go lower level for more performance. Even hardware (GPUs) that functional language could trivially exploit, it’s still higher performance to write low level code and manages all the memory imperatively
- ModernMech 13d ago
  I think you’re right about people, but by volume, 99% of all future code will be written by machines. So there’s ample opportunity for other languages to flourish; if humans can’t get past imperative programming, machines can.
  - cosmic_cheese 13d ago
    In my mind this hinges on whether LLMs become capable of actual comprehension of the code they’re writing. If not, for serious projects (especially those which are mission-critical), it still makes sense to optimize for human understanding when selecting languages so the code can reasonably be verified.

api 14d ago

I would say Rust is a functional language that has been hammered into the shape of C++. It also draws heavily on ML. I get why, and it makes it a better fit for its obvious “C++ reimagined, cleaner, and better” niche.

pjmlp 14d ago

Modern and blazing fast, what we lost leaving behind languages like Modula-2 and Object Pascal, having newer generations to think C and C++ were the only compiled languages alternatives to scripting languages.

touisteur 14d ago
I miss the years of writing CLI tools, web servers and clients, in Ada (and of course, real-time complex distributed system...). Felt so simple and right and fast and robust. The code is still readable today and maintaining it is a zero effort today. Clean Java without the enterprise BS was a close second in ease of programming - boilerplate be damned. I'm glad NVIDIA found a way to make GPUs programmable and got us out of the shaders tarpit, but did it have to be C++...
- pjmlp 14d ago
  Also a good one.
jstimpfle 14d ago
You repeating this weird strawman take a million times doesn't make it true. Why don't you finally just put out some genuinely interesting projects demonstrating how everybody was doing it wrong, so people can make up their own mind and finally be convinced. There must be some true magic in those languages and platforms you mention, that should offset the pain of writing in upper case and with super long KEYWORDs everywhere, and to offset the cost of switching to a culture that has way less mindshare and way less of a software ecosystem around it. FWIW I've actually worked for 6 months on a large old Delphi project. It was some performance work that, as almost always, mainly required getting the language crap out of the way. In the end I got the job done (100x-1000x speedup) but I wouldn't want to switch back to this ecosystem: Licensing costs, weird language warts there too. A slow moving ecosystem. Ultimately, I just need something that does what I tell it to do, reliably and fast, and that doesn't get in the way.
- pjmlp 14d ago
  If you don't like, press PgDn.
  - AndrewDucker 14d ago
    People should reply on Hacker News. If you disagree with someone's opinion and you have reasons for doing so then the right thing to do is share them.
    - pjmlp 14d ago
      Sure, except there is a bit of history here, this isn't the first exchange, and I am not bothering to reply back as we aren't going to change opinion on C vs safer languages until we leave this realm. Thus we can keep filling HN with pointless comments or move on.
      - jstimpfle 14d ago
        There is plenty history of you repeating the same strawmans literally thousands of times. I've just never seen _anyone_ on HN (or elsewhere for that matter) make such claims?

cosmic_cheese 14d ago

I’m more than a bit out of my depth discussing the topic, but I’m not sure than imperative-dominant languages will ever really go away or that functional-dominant languages will ever become as popular as C and C++. Ugly as they may be, imperative languages seem to be grokked by humans more readily and are more often than not “good enough” for the most part so it’s difficult to see them losing substantial momentum.

pyrolistical 14d ago
Until there is a machine that is natively functional, there is always going to an incentive to go lower level for more performance. Even hardware (GPUs) that functional language could trivially exploit, it’s still higher performance to write low level code and manages all the memory imperatively
ModernMech 13d ago
I think you’re right about people, but by volume, 99% of all future code will be written by machines. So there’s ample opportunity for other languages to flourish; if humans can’t get past imperative programming, machines can.
- cosmic_cheese 13d ago
  In my mind this hinges on whether LLMs become capable of actual comprehension of the code they’re writing. If not, for serious projects (especially those which are mission-critical), it still makes sense to optimize for human understanding when selecting languages so the code can reasonably be verified.