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by lmm 3046 days ago
When you work with the type system it checks a lot more than you check in Python. In Python you pass around untyped tuples and maps because defining classes won't gain you anything (and is surprisingly cumbersome and unpythonic), whereas in an ML-family language like Rust you use lightweight, fine-grained types to check that every function call is correct and you can refactor fearlessly.

(I'd recommend using a language with garbage collection unless you really need to not though; OCaml is quite Rust-like but means you won't have to worry about the borrow checker)
2 comments
saghm 3046 days ago
> I'd recommend using a language with garbage collection unless you really need to not though; OCaml is quite Rust-like but means you won't have to worry about the borrow checker

OTOH, Rust arguably has a better story for tooling (build system, dependency management, etc.), a more full-featured standard library, and better concurrency support. Depending on your priorities, some or all of these might be worth having to learn the borrow checker.

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FullyFunctional 3046 days ago
Well, O'Caml and Haskell predates Rust by decades. I was delighted to see Sum-Product types in Rust when I played with it. They go a long way to cleanly model the problem domain. Obviously you can simulate them, but it's much easier to get wrong or "cheat" (say having a bunch of fields, only some of which are valid depending on a tag).
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lmm 3045 days ago
> I was delighted to see Sum-Product types in Rust when I played with it. They go a long way to cleanly model the problem domain.

Umm yeah, they've been a part of every ML-family language since the '70s, OCaml, Haskell and Rust included.

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tome 3045 days ago
(FullyFunctional seems to understand this, as far as I can tell)
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FullyFunctional 3036 days ago
I do, but I wasn't aware that Rust was considered in the ML family (ML as Meta Language, like SML/NJ). I'm somewhat skeptical of that.

What I see from Rust is a lot of the really great things from functional languages (esp. strong typing) and beyond, but applying them to a language aiming as low as C. That's certainly interesting.

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