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by danite
2582 days ago
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I used to be a big Haskell programmer. While I still love the language, I've really come around to the idea that strictly evaluated functional languages like F# or OCaml are the best for programming in. You get the nice functional features but don't have the straightjacket of laziness forcing you into certain design decisions. It's really nice sometimes to be able to mix in impure, side effectful code without having to thread it through a monad. The OCaml family feels like a nice blend of good sound functional features with enough escape hatches to be productive in real world programs that might occasionally need arrays or mutable state or IO. Laziness by default also makes things like debugging or reasoning about performance frustratingly difficult. I do miss Haskell's typeclasses in these languages, though. My ideal language is basically Ocaml/F# but with Haskell's syntax and typeclasses. |
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Additionally, on cases where you’re not specifying the data of the type itself, you can use static type constraints on members. This doesn’t give you a default implementation like Haskell but you can always provide one as a function.
Btw the monadic threading is still very useful, especially when mixing impure code and mutation (when appropriate). The async and result monads, in F# computation expression form, are particularly useful.
For a good example of async + impure code, check out MailboxProcessor, which is part of the standard F# lib. Works similar to CSP/goroutine + channels/actor models; makes parallelized concurrency and message passing easy. You can also make pure mailboxes easily by recursively passing data forward, but sometimes you don’t want to for memory / gc & alloc reasons.