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Comment by misiek08

1 day ago

Im so happy seeing this. We are approaching „great language” level and for me this is the first one.

I would be thankful for pointing at any other language that reliably and safely adds great features and is already convenient to use. I jumped from mastering Go to learning advanced C#, because Go stopped with adding great things :(

8 comments

misiek08

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mega_dean  1 day ago

I don’t know if it satisfies “already convenient to use”, but IMO ocaml fits “adds great features reliably and safely”. They merged their multicore compiler ~4 years ago, which was a pretty huge change that added parallelism through domains. Notably, they had a working version ~10 years ago, but refused to merge it until they sorted out some performance issues that would have affected existing single-threaded code.

I only say it’s not “already convenient to use” because I heard tons of complaints about the dev environment - mostly that there’s no debugger, no official package manager, etc. But they are working on ‘dune’, and just like the language itself, I got the impression that the dune developers were being conscious to “add great features reliably and safely”. So overall I thought it was a great language/ecosystem, ymmv though.

  • siwatanejo  21 hours ago

    IMO OCaml is mind-bending (e.g. go figure out the 'in' keyword, I still don't understand it), F# is much easier/simpler.

    • shikck200  3 hours ago

      Ocaml is just an ML in the traditional sense. It keep scope without curlies. There is really not much else to it.

    • spider-mario  8 hours ago

      `let <var> = <expr> in <expr>` is an expression. Top-level bindings are just `let <var> = <expr>`. That’s pretty much all there is to it.

          let fac =
      let rec fac' acc = function
        | 0 -> acc
        | n -> fac' (n * acc) (n - 1)
      in
      fac' 1

    let seven =
      let four = 4 and three = 3 in
      four + three

      https://ideone.com/HpTrI4

    • debugnik  11 hours ago

      The 'in' keyword is purely syntax, like semicolons/newlines or braces in your language of choice.

    • tuvix  18 hours ago

      Never used OCaml but it seems like a way to chain together expressions using the same variable name? Seems odd but I could see myself using it

flexagoon  11 hours ago

If I understand correctly that you think Elixir is not yet "convenient to use", I suggest you still give it a shot if you haven't. I'm generally a huge hater of dynamically typed languages, and I still love using Elixir.

sethammons  12 hours ago

I am a fan of Go, and have been interested in c#; would be interested in hearing about your experience