Re: OT: interesting talk by Jane Street technical guy on why they used Ocaml
On Saturday, 3 October 2015 at 01:41:55 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKcOkWzj0_s a little old but still relevant. talks about importance of brevity and strong types for readability (also avoiding boilerplate). two of the partners there committed to read every line of code (originally because they were terrified). very hard to code review boilerplate carefully because it is just too dull! (can't pay people enough!) [...] there's also andy smith's talk [0] at dconf 2015 on adapting D, titled "hedge fund development case study." [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KBhb0iWsWQ
Re: OT: interesting talk by Jane Street technical guy on why they used Ocaml
On Saturday, 3 October 2015 at 15:58:38 UTC, Mengu wrote: On Saturday, 3 October 2015 at 01:41:55 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKcOkWzj0_s a little old but still relevant. talks about importance of brevity and strong types for readability (also avoiding boilerplate). two of the partners there committed to read every line of code (originally because they were terrified). very hard to code review boilerplate carefully because it is just too dull! (can't pay people enough!) [...] there's also andy smith's talk [0] at dconf 2015 on adapting D, titled "hedge fund development case study." [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KBhb0iWsWQ Thanks! Funnily enough I rewatched the Jane Street talk because of a suggestion made by John Colvin when I was talking to Andy and him recently. It's a good talk by Andy, and I hope to build on this with him at Codemesh next month. The way languages actually get adopted is different from how people who are sitting in eg the kind of enterprise environment where they are never going to be early adopters imagine. Hence one is much better off focusing efforts on those already receptive (and who are looking for a solution to their pain) than trying to convert those who are happy with what they have or uninterested (possibly rationally so) in exploring new things. Being able to understand the codebase is underrated I think.
Re: OT: interesting talk by Jane Street technical guy on why they used Ocaml
On Saturday, 3 October 2015 at 16:33:38 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote: On Saturday, 3 October 2015 at 15:58:38 UTC, Mengu wrote: On Saturday, 3 October 2015 at 01:41:55 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKcOkWzj0_s a little old but still relevant. talks about importance of brevity and strong types for readability (also avoiding boilerplate). two of the partners there committed to read every line of code (originally because they were terrified). very hard to code review boilerplate carefully because it is just too dull! (can't pay people enough!) [...] there's also andy smith's talk [0] at dconf 2015 on adapting D, titled "hedge fund development case study." [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KBhb0iWsWQ Thanks! Funnily enough I rewatched the Jane Street talk because of a suggestion made by John Colvin when I was talking to Andy and him recently. It's a good talk by Andy, and I hope to build on this with him at Codemesh next month. The way languages actually get adopted is different from how people who are sitting in eg the kind of enterprise environment where they are never going to be early adopters imagine. Hence one is much better off focusing efforts on those already receptive (and who are looking for a solution to their pain) than trying to convert those who are happy with what they have or uninterested (possibly rationally so) in exploring new things. Being able to understand the codebase is underrated I think. i watched this talk by yaron last year when i was looking at alternatives for sml. i was taking the programming languages course on coursera by dan grossman. ocaml looked like it tooked off at the beginning of 2000s but then due to many problems it failed to be a mainstream language. imho, D will never take off like go or rust because people who adopted these languages are mostly python and ruby developers. D has an incredibly creative and helpful community yet our community is not as enthusiastic as go's and rust's community. phobos is extremely a great library yet not very welcoming and feels overly complicated. we should reduce the amount of WTFs when reading the phobos source and docs.
Re: OT: interesting talk by Jane Street technical guy on why they used Ocaml
On Sunday, 4 October 2015 at 00:45:16 UTC, Mengu wrote: i watched this talk by yaron last year when i was looking at alternatives for sml. i was taking the programming languages course on coursera by dan grossman. ocaml looked like it tooked off at the beginning of 2000s but then due to many problems it failed to be a mainstream language. interesting, thanks. I played with ocaml a little, but simply didn't have time to do more than that. I was interested in the commercial aspects of his experience, as that happens to resonate with my own experience. imho, D will never take off like go or rust because people who adopted these languages are mostly python and ruby developers. rust is only barely out of beta, and doesn't yet seem to be used in many enterprises, whereas D's status is rather different given the size of firms built on it. I know what you mean about perceptions, and that perhaps may change now you have two of the best C++ programmers working on it fulltime, and not just one ;) D has an incredibly creative and helpful community yet our community is not as enthusiastic as go's and rust's community. why do you think that is ? one reason might be different kind of use cases. one has a different emotional experience and draws different kinds of people for some kinds of projects than others, and that's surely reflected in the tone of the community. also things just have their own spirit, and that is what it is, and enthusiasm can be a positive thing, but isn't without drawbacks either. I'd say I am impressed by the sheer grit people have, and that's something important too. phobos is extremely a great library yet not very welcoming and feels overly complicated. we should reduce the amount of WTFs when reading the phobos source and docs. look at the rate of change as well as the level. the docs could be better, and we could have more blog posts. but picture is much better than when I first looked at D a couple of years back. I remember trying for ages just to get std.net.curl to work and almost giving up in despair. (I noticed recently docs were still wrong, so I fixed them). we should give ourselves credit for the distance travelled, even if there's a long road further to get to where we want. Laeeth.
OT: interesting talk by Jane Street technical guy on why they used Ocaml
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKcOkWzj0_s a little old but still relevant. talks about importance of brevity and strong types for readability (also avoiding boilerplate). two of the partners there committed to read every line of code (originally because they were terrified). very hard to code review boilerplate carefully because it is just too dull! (can't pay people enough!) correctness is v important if you are doing high volumes. but being able to iterate rapidly is important in other areas too. value of predictable performance in generated code. much easier to hire great programmers in ocaml. way they switched wasn't a big strategic plan. guy just turned up at a windows shop (spreadsheets with VB backends etc) in a temp job between university courses. ended up being permanent thing. started hiring people to help him with analysis. became clearer they needed a better solution - nightmare from copying/paste with spreadsheets. sent email to ocaml list and 15 responses of which 12 great and 3 he hired - great ratio. maybe do an experiment. wrote first version of system in 3 months, worked well and slowly expanded from there. part of attraction of ocaml was ability to hire. later if they need more people they can teach them. they don't hire bad programmers, and it's easy to teach good ones. F# does not perform well. needs to allocate! F# developers dismissive 'you must have bug in your program'. F# has null problem - becomes problem when calling .net libraries. windows not great for high performance (timestamps weird).
