6 ms·

A year. A year of an apparently excellent programmer's output -- perhaps 2% of everything he will ever accomplish. To port a stable project to an 18 year old la

A year. A year of an apparently excellent programmer's output -- perhaps 2% of everything he will ever accomplish. To port a stable project to an 18 year old language.

lucian1900 12y ago
Considering most languages (even most new ones) ignore many more decades of programming language research, 18 years is pretty good: it was cutting edge PL research at the time.
- trurl 12y ago
  OCaml hasn't stood still either. The latest releases take advantage of some "fairly recent" research. Python on the other hand didn't even take advantage of cutting edge research at the time it was created, and as far as I can tell hasn't since.
Igglyboo 12y ago
Python itself is 23 years old and older than OCaml. Java, C, C++ are also older than OCaml and all 4 are highly used today. I don't think language age has any bearing on quality or usefulness.
- toolslive 12y ago
  Actually, the core of the language is way older. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caml_Light http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caml_Light and it can be considered a dialect of ML, which is even older (from 1973).
hvs 12y ago
Youth, for a programming language (and many other things), is not a positive benefit.
zem 12y ago
and in which he gained a massive speedup in the project, made it a lot easier to maintain and extend, learnt a lot about ocaml, and finally managed to get a really exciting job due to the exposure his blog gave him.
- spenrose 12y ago
  Wow, hate-haters gonna hate my hate. The slowest metric for the old code is about 1/3 of a second -- how much benefit does slicing that deliver in real world 0install invocations? "Easier to maintain and extend" -- well, he just cut the population of potential contributors to the project by a factor of 1000. The exciting job he got because it required knowing OCaml, and he spent a year advertising himself as a competent OCaml hacker. I find it very strange to care more about what language a project is written in than what the project actually does.
  - toolslive 12y ago
    I'm going to feed the troll here, but "cut the population of potential contributors to the project by a factor 1000" is a flawed argument : The value of potential contributors is very low. You're better of trying to increase the comfort and power of the _current_ contributors.
  - orthecreedence 12y ago
    > hate-haters gonna hate my hate Yeah, and fanbois gonna fanboi. He found something that works better for his use case. Sure, Python has has more programmers available, but that's because it's the flavor of the week (thanks to Google, let's be honest). In 3 years it may be the language time forgot. It makes a lot more sense to pick something you enjoy programming in and makes your life easier than something that everyone else thinks is the shit. Python has its place, and that place is not everywhere.
- gbog 12y ago
  Easier to maintain? Well at least you should add that this move from python to ocaml made it much harder to find someone able to maintain this project.
SloopJon 12y ago
During which time he became proficient in the language and landed what sounds like a pretty cool job.
_random_ 12y ago
The thing is that strong static inference beats dynamicity.
- klibertp 12y ago
  It's just an opinion, not "the thing", whatever that would be.
  - _random_ 12y ago
    OK, my opinion is that there is no need to throw away type safety to gain succinctness, especially if your language gives you REPL.
    - thinkpad20 12y ago
      The advantage of dynamic languages is not in succinctness; the advantage is being able to defer the concrete definitions of the objects you're dealing with, or to ignore them entirely: it's what lets you pass arbitrary objects around in your middleware stack, or do things like ActiveRecord, click.py or sh.py which do crazy things with the object and module system, etc. There are things that are really hard in a statically typed language, or that you simply can't do, that dynamic languages let you do effortlessly. Of course, all of this freedom comes with cost. But gaining succinctness is hardly the major win of dynamic languages.
      - mercurial 12y ago
        Well, succinctness is an advantage, and I'll claim with no data to support me that it is the reason, combined with the lack of compilation, that most developers choose dynamic languages, without necessarily realizing what they are giving up.
        thinkpad20 12y ago
        As someone who works for a company that uses python, but mostly uses Haskell in his spare time, my python code is often far more verbose than my Haskell (for a similar degree of complexity). I suppose if your yardstick is Java or something than you'll probably be more concise in a dynamic language, but that's really besides the point. The amount of characters you type in a language is one of the least important factors in choosing whether to use it or not. It's certainly not the reason that we use it.

A year. A year of an apparently excellent programmer's output -- perhaps 2% of everything he will ever accomplish. To port a stable project to an 18 year old language.

lucian1900 12y ago

Considering most languages (even most new ones) ignore many more decades of programming language research, 18 years is pretty good: it was cutting edge PL research at the time.

trurl 12y ago
OCaml hasn't stood still either. The latest releases take advantage of some "fairly recent" research. Python on the other hand didn't even take advantage of cutting edge research at the time it was created, and as far as I can tell hasn't since.

Igglyboo 12y ago

Python itself is 23 years old and older than OCaml. Java, C, C++ are also older than OCaml and all 4 are highly used today. I don't think language age has any bearing on quality or usefulness.

toolslive 12y ago
Actually, the core of the language is way older. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caml_Light http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caml_Light and it can be considered a dialect of ML, which is even older (from 1973).

hvs 12y ago

Youth, for a programming language (and many other things), is not a positive benefit.

zem 12y ago

and in which he gained a massive speedup in the project, made it a lot easier to maintain and extend, learnt a lot about ocaml, and finally managed to get a really exciting job due to the exposure his blog gave him.

spenrose 12y ago
Wow, hate-haters gonna hate my hate. The slowest metric for the old code is about 1/3 of a second -- how much benefit does slicing that deliver in real world 0install invocations? "Easier to maintain and extend" -- well, he just cut the population of potential contributors to the project by a factor of 1000. The exciting job he got because it required knowing OCaml, and he spent a year advertising himself as a competent OCaml hacker. I find it very strange to care more about what language a project is written in than what the project actually does.
- toolslive 12y ago
  I'm going to feed the troll here, but "cut the population of potential contributors to the project by a factor 1000" is a flawed argument : The value of potential contributors is very low. You're better of trying to increase the comfort and power of the _current_ contributors.
- orthecreedence 12y ago
  > hate-haters gonna hate my hate Yeah, and fanbois gonna fanboi. He found something that works better for his use case. Sure, Python has has more programmers available, but that's because it's the flavor of the week (thanks to Google, let's be honest). In 3 years it may be the language time forgot. It makes a lot more sense to pick something you enjoy programming in and makes your life easier than something that everyone else thinks is the shit. Python has its place, and that place is not everywhere.
gbog 12y ago
Easier to maintain? Well at least you should add that this move from python to ocaml made it much harder to find someone able to maintain this project.

SloopJon 12y ago

During which time he became proficient in the language and landed what sounds like a pretty cool job.

_random_ 12y ago

The thing is that strong static inference beats dynamicity.

klibertp 12y ago
It's just an opinion, not "the thing", whatever that would be.
- _random_ 12y ago
  OK, my opinion is that there is no need to throw away type safety to gain succinctness, especially if your language gives you REPL.
  - thinkpad20 12y ago
    The advantage of dynamic languages is not in succinctness; the advantage is being able to defer the concrete definitions of the objects you're dealing with, or to ignore them entirely: it's what lets you pass arbitrary objects around in your middleware stack, or do things like ActiveRecord, click.py or sh.py which do crazy things with the object and module system, etc. There are things that are really hard in a statically typed language, or that you simply can't do, that dynamic languages let you do effortlessly. Of course, all of this freedom comes with cost. But gaining succinctness is hardly the major win of dynamic languages.
    - mercurial 12y ago
      Well, succinctness is an advantage, and I'll claim with no data to support me that it is the reason, combined with the lack of compilation, that most developers choose dynamic languages, without necessarily realizing what they are giving up.
      - thinkpad20 12y ago
        As someone who works for a company that uses python, but mostly uses Haskell in his spare time, my python code is often far more verbose than my Haskell (for a similar degree of complexity). I suppose if your yardstick is Java or something than you'll probably be more concise in a dynamic language, but that's really besides the point. The amount of characters you type in a language is one of the least important factors in choosing whether to use it or not. It's certainly not the reason that we use it.