Comment by correct_horse
1 day ago
Haskell, OCaml, Erlang lead the way and Rust, Zig and Go get all the mindshare. I feel like its a common pattern for more experimental languages to pioneer features and other languages to copy the features and bring them to a C style syntax that the majority of devs are familiar with.
Rust and Zig brought new ideas for memory management that Haskell, OCaml, Erlang sidestep having garbage control. its honestly amazing to me that they managed to get the adoption they have while being so innovative. I say this as a fulltime elixir dev.
What new ideas did Zig bring to memory management?
Pluggable allocators. Allocators are passed to functions as arguments, the caller decides exactly how memory is managed. Maybe not "new" in idea, but "new" in being consistently applied everywhere in language & libraries.
3 replies →
You would be surprised to see, how OCaml and the BEAM specifically think about memory.
Zig is Modula-2, Ada 83 with a curly brackets, what new ideas?
Being first isn't necessarily good if you get it wrong, though. Laziness by default and Hindley-Milner type inference seem like mistakes that simply aren't going to get cleaned up. Other languages make their own mistakes too.
What's wrong with Hindley-Milner?
Leaving out types in public API's makes type errors hard to understand. Types should be declared in the API and bidirectional type inference used in the implementation.
https://jimmyhmiller.com/easiest-way-to-build-type-checker
1 reply →
> I feel like its a common pattern for more experimental languages to pioneer features and other languages to copy the features and bring them to a C style syntax that the majority of devs are familiar with.
You're ignoring the fact that it's harder to bring new features to older languages as they have more bloat to deal with as not every idea turns into a success. So younger more focused languages can iterate more quickly. Also, being willing to make breaking changes makes things easier. Microsoft tries hard not to do that with C#.
Over time, maintaining any software becomes harder, languages are no exception. The fact that c# is still around, and still being developed is a feat in itself
I wish I could find the reference, but there was a great blog / article by a computer science academic basically saying that OO, procedural, and functional paradigms are extremes of a design space where the “middle” of its Pareto frontier was essentially unknown until recent advances.
Moreover, many functional languages are getting pseudo-procedural features via the like of “do” syntax and monads, but that this is in some sense a double abstraction over the underlying machine that is already inherently procedural.
Starting from a language that is already procedural and sprinkling some functional abstractions on top is simpler to implement and easier for humans to use and understand.
Rust especially showed that many of the supposed advantages of functional languages are not their exclusive domain, such as sum types and a powerful type system.
Update: Hah! ChatGPT found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21280429
Note the top comment especially, which explains succinctly why functional has rather substantial downsides.
The idea that Erlang is experimental is pretty amusing- it’s one of the most stable platforms there is.