On Monday 05 November 2007 02:34, Steve Lianoglou wrote: > Hi Jon, > > While it's going to take me a while to make heads or tails of your > entire post, I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to write > such a detailed response. > > Thanks!
Not at all. I described the major points but there are still many other aspects of Scala that I am undecided on. Scala, OCaml and F# all take different approaches to the rich syntax of user-defined operators, particularly infix operators. The Scala approach of using member functions called "+" is quite alien to me and it involves some trade-offs. After almost a year of working full-time on F#, I am still undecided on whether or not mixing C#-style operator overloading and ML-style type inference in F# is a good thing. In the end, there may be more aspects of Scala that I consider to be sub-optimal design decisions. There are also practical problems when migrating from a stand-alone FPL like OCaml to one hosted by an existing platform like .NET or the JVM. Stand-alone FPLs like OCaml and MLton are fantastically efficient but .NET and the JVM are optimized for heavily-imperative code. Consequently, allocation often makes functional F# programs run 5x slower than equivalent OCaml, exceptions are 600x slower in F# than in OCaml (and they are a core part of the CAML family of languages, used extensively in ordinary non-exceptional code: OCaml's exceptions are very fast, around 6x faster than C++!) and marshalling in F# has been 1,000x slower for me. I honestly thought that I could grok F# from my OCaml background in only a few months but a year later and I am still battling with all of these trade-offs, design decisions and I have barely dented the issue of libraries, active web pages, Windows Presentation Foundation and so forth. Following a discussion on Lambda the Ultimate, I am working on an article comparing and contrasting the OCaml and F# languages in detail. I'll let you know when I make the article freely available on our site. I think many of the points will be very relevant for people trying to build modern languages for the JVM. There is one thing I am sure of: the future is bright for functional programming! -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "JVM Languages" group. To post to this group, send email to jvm-languages@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/jvm-languages?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
