Programmer, graduate student, and gamer. I’m also learning French and love any opportunity to practice :)

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • You have to be explicit about which module you’re using at all times, even though 99% of the time only one could apply. When the type class resolution is unique, but complicated, there’s no mental overhead for the Haskell programmer but getting all the right modules is a lot of overhead for the OCaml programmer. It also lets us write functions that are polymorphic under a class constraint. In OCaml you have to explicitly take a module argument to do this. If you want to start composing such functions, it gets tedious extremely fast.

    And then even once you’re using a module, you can’t overload a function name. See: + vs +.. Basically modules and type classes solve different problems. You can do some things with modules that you cannot ergonomically do with type classes, for example. create a bit-set representation of sets of integers, and a balanced search tree for sets of other types, and expose that interface uniformly from the same module functor. But Haskell has other ways to achieve that same functionality and more.

    OCaml’s type system cannot replicate the things you can do with Haskell’s higher kinded types, type families, or data kinds at all (except for a fraction of Haskell’s GADTs).


  • Largely reasonable?

    Haskell is not good for systems programming which sums up about 60-70% of that post. Laziness is lovely in theory but many industry uses of Haskell use stricthaskell for all or most of their code, so I certainly agree with that part too.

    Their largest complaint about using Haskell for small non-systems programs seems to be the mental overhead induced by laziness. But for me, for small programs where performance isn’t a huge concern (think Advent of code or a script for daily life) laziness reduces my mental overhead. I think that author is just especially concerned about having a deep understanding of their programs’ performance because of their systems background. I worry about performance when it becomes relevant. Debugging Haskell performance issues is certainly harder than strict languages but still totally doable.

    The lack of type classes or other form of ergonomic overloading in OCaml is easily the single “feature” most responsible for the language never taking off.







  • I’m a computer scientist mainly but with a heavy focus/interest in computer architecture. My plan is to teach at a university at this point - but it seems to me like that would be a good place to create completely open standards technology from.^1Specifically because if the point isn’t to make money, there’s no reason to create walled gardens.

    There’s certainly enough interest from people who want to be able to build their own systems. What would actually worry me isn’t the ability to make a new open standard or any of that. It’s that AMD64 is very hard to compete with in this space, because the processors are just faster, and there is so much x86 software that people who build PCs usually want access to.

    AMD64’s performance is the result of years and years of optimizations and patenting new hardware techniques, followed by aggressively litigating people trying to compete. ARM performance is catching up but ARM prefers licensing their core IP over making their own systems, making it harder for them to break into the PC space even if they want to.

    A new player would be in for a long, long time of unprofitable work just to compete with AMD64 - which most people are still happy with anyway.

    ^1 some others and I are actually working on some new ISA / open soft processors for it. However it is focused at an educational setting and unlikely to ever be used outside of embedded devices at most.


  • The s in « s’appelle » is the (reflexive) pronoun « se », whereas the t in « t’appelles » is « te ». It’s the difference between “what does he call himself” and “what do you call yourself.”

    The Quebec thing would be « comment tu t’appelles-tu ? » where the second « tu » is a question marker, not a pronoun (but also I don’t think I’ve ever heard that form used for this question).