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0 points59nadir3y ago0 comments

> F# and OCaml are much more practical than Haskell

For industrial applications in most deployment environments Haskell is a much more practical language than OCaml, due to having many more modern runtime features (green threads, STM, etc., that for many years have made the lack of multicore support in OCaml seem embarrassing). It's not really that that gap has been caught up to now either, OCaml is still many years behind Haskell in basic runtime features.

F# obviously has a practically useful and featureful runtime, but has a scheduler that makes it easy to get thread exhaustion, whereas Haskell has a preemptive one that will make that a non-issue.

I find that the "practical language" argument is usually used by people who have never used either OCaml or Haskell for solving real world problems. In practice OCaml is a did-not-finish versus the comparatively (to most other languages, notably losing to the BEAM languages) excellent finishing time of Haskell.

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WastingMyTime893y ago· 1 in thread

I have used both. Ocaml is a joy. I would rather swallow shards of glass than work with Haskell again.

The language is a mess. The compiler is slow. Performance is poor. The community is insufferable.

I think that what is meant by practical.

applicative3y ago

The community burned me in the end - fortunately a little committee took over my libraries when I left in a rage at some of its truly insufferable vindictive self appointed leaders. I think this comes and goes and the main body of users is tirelessly helpful.

But the rest of this is nonsense. The compiler is a flat out miracle, a monument to human understanding, and produces unbelievably fast programs given the weird and wonderful abstract material one hands to it.

bmitc3y ago

I was mainly addressing Carmack's points on the "culture" of these languages, but F# is definitely more practical overall than Haskell, in my opinion. Eager by default with optional lazy evaluation, mutability, OOP, functional, pragmatic and huge standard library, easy FFI, CLI tooling, easy to use async and concurrency, and a strong VM that basically runs anywhere and is easy to install all go a long way. I am less familiar with the particulars of OCaml because I have never needed to reach for it over F#, and yes, the longstanding multicore support deficiency was not great.

Also, to elaborate on my reply to Carmack, I think he is grossly underestimating the prevalence of esoteric implementations and DSLs in C, C++, and their ilk.

And yes, Elixir and Erlang, especially Elixir, are very practical languages. I'm hard pressed these days to look any further than F# or Elixir for projects because they effectively cover all bases from soft real-time embedded and up.

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