wrote some Rust for the first time today. I’m thinking of doing Advent of Code in it this year

although Clojure is also very tempting. maybe both??

I keep thinking of going through Little Lisper using Racket

here I am doing a back & forth with ocaml lately. I seem to do that again and again every few years

ocaml is cool! and gaining lots of popularity these days probably via reasonml

I liked it before it was cool 🙂, old love

but there are some rough edges still

who was the ocaml developer by day, clojure programmer by night here in slack?

I guess it's now usable for front-end stuff, but I am still doubtful about the rest. It's highly task specific and the ecosystem is quite small

it's hard not to feel spoiled after a jvm lang

I have mixed feelings about ReasonML's rising popularity. I mean, I'm happy that OCaml's semantics are getting more popular, but it saddens me to see what makes a language popular is superficial things like "brackets over s-expressions". That says a lot about the overall web frontend culture IMHO.

wasn’t it brackets over significant whitespace?

Hmm, not sure but that might be just 2 different ways of saying the same thing - IIUC ML exprs are like s-exprs where many parens are optional

yeah I am not a fan of reason, it's good that it brings more people into ocaml world but that's about it.

I find there's a machiavellian ring to it - pragmatic but also a bit cynical. "Let's lure the masses with brackets."

We should try that with ClojureScript actually - let's swap the roles of parentheses and brackets, and call it ReasonClj

might be a good April fool’s joke

http://clochure.org/

it's like with elixir, you end up having to know how to read (at least) the parent language, so why not just use that one

well I shouldn't say that, we'd all be using java

btw, Scala swapped [ ] and <> in type annotations as a kind of joke on Java I believe

ArrayList<Int> vs ArrayList[Int]. Not sure if I get the joke.

Maybe that made it easier to represent Scala's infamous XML literals ?

@borkdude OCaml doesn’t have “significant whitespace syntax”

it’s not like Python in that regard

ah that’s an improvement over Haskell then

btw re: brackets

I was once of that opinion too

but I have to take issue with this: > it saddens me to see what makes a language popular is superficial things like “brackets over s-expressions”

@val_waeselynck let me see if I got your point: things like “brackets over s-expressions” are superficial therefore they shouldn’t need to be changed to appease to a wider audience

is that what you’re trying to communicate?

OCaml syntax is a wreck tho

once you realize it’s kind of parens-less lisp it starts to make sense, but I still find it very awkward compared to lisp or an Algol-inspired syntax

I’m actually finding Rust surprisingly similar to ReasonML

but with Rust you have a lot of complexity around memory management, no? …

or at least, I translated an AoC challenge from last year from ReasonML to Rust and they are almost identical

@dev964 I haven’t attempted anything complex with it, so I don’t know how that interweaves with most programs. but yes, in Rust you are manually managing memory with help from the borrow checker

using it for my toy example it felt surprisingly high level

I think it’s safe to say that most teams make good decisions essentially by accident

which means that minor points of friction like an unfamiliar syntax can easily sway teams to go with something else

it also begs the question, “how do we discern the right reasons for choosing a specific language?”

not necessarily disagreeing with you @val_waeselynck but I am not convinced that it is a cultural problem

@val_waeselynck that does make sense. But I think you said something very important there. People would have never considered OCaml simply because it has always been regarded as an obscure research language. ReasonML makes it more appealing because of familiarity. And familiarity is important for e.g. people who’ve never taken a PL class in college

they wouldn’t know where to look, but if this old thing marketed as a new shiny thing appeals to them, then they might use it

(I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m adding to what you said)