Doc Hawkins posted:

drat, what's your favorite functional language then?

hannibal posted:

EclipseFP is dead, the main guy stopped working on it. If Emacs is too much I'd go with Sublime, Atom or VSCode.

Also I thought the platform was using stack internally now? There was a big debate about it a few months back.

Athas posted:

Athas posted:

No, but transactional memory is not automatically very performant (again: parallelism is easy, efficient parallelism is not). Furthermore, another reason is probably that GHC is the most dynamic and active research compiler I know of, and run quite well by people both technically and socially competent.

rjmccall posted:

As a former PhD student who once wrote an embarrassingly-gushing-in-hindsight essay about TM... kindof? It's very easy to write code that is obviously "correct" with TM, but that means a lot less than you might think. TM — hardware or software — tends to degrade terribly in the face of any actual contention for the memory being accessed, because of course the transaction cannot be applied if any of the memory has been touched. But even absent contention, verifying the validity of the transaction is very expensive in software implementations, and hardware implementations tend to both impose arbitrary implementation limits and add a risk of spurious rejection. This is all exacerbated by the fact that TM as expressed in systems like Haskell makes it very easy to construct enormous transactions which would require a minor miracle to actually apply in a system that isn't vastly over-specced for its load.

Banned King Urgoon posted:

It won't, because macros and functions serve different purposes (and you should never use a macro when a function will suffice). The reason for macros is to implement new syntactic forms, with their own flow control.

Siguy posted:

I was talking a little out of my rear end since I didn't put much effort into learning Common Lisp, but all the built-in functions felt very old-school and weird to me, with lots of abbreviations and terminology I wasn't familiar with. That doesn't mean they're bad necessarily and I probably overstated saying they have no logic, but as someone new to the language I didn't understand why sometimes a common function would be a clear written out word like "concatenate" and other times a function would just be "elt" or "rplaca".

xtal posted:

Lately I've been learning Idris because Haskell has a bunch of warts that make me cry. The library support is, expectedly, lacking, so I'm considering writing Haskell with an alternate prelude instead. Has anybody worked with ClassyPrelude, Protolude or Foundation who can help me decide what to use? (Or tell me if this is even a good idea, because I expect I am going to need to add a whole lot of string conversions for compatibility with libraries.)

Asymmetrikon posted:

I like Idris over Haskell because of some of the historical weirdness it got rid of (switching : and ::, returning Maybe instead of erroring in, i.e., List access functions, the whole Monad/Applicative thing, Int vs. Integer.) I haven't looked too much into GHC 8, though.

xtal posted:

I have a bunch of small complaints (Idris improves a lot more than the type system) but the lack of performance (String) and safety (totality) in the Prelude are what gets me. Having an opaque list type already pokes holes in type safety, so at the very least I want a Prelude that is total. Alternatives also tend to be implemented via type classes rather than concrete types which I prefer.

xtal posted:

I just wanted you to know I am really on board with lenses now. I was avoiding them because I think Template Haskell is the plague but I'm able to compartmentalize all of that junk in a Types file.

xtal posted:

So your choices are the horror of template Haskell or the horrors of boilerplate?

everythingWasBees posted:

As I'm finding myself using C++ and C# for everything course and research related, I'd really like to try a functional language to give myself a breath of fresh air. I'm mainly interested in making games and interactive graphical toys. Is there a language with more robust Vulkan and OpenGL support than others? Is there any that are more suited than others for games? I know you can use F# with Unity, is that a decent choice?

xtal posted:

It's decently efficient. Performance is, by their admittance, not a priority. You can generate more than just C, though. JavaScript, CLR, JVM and LLVM backends are under development by third-parties.

Shinku ABOOKEN posted:

Genuine question: What's the real world utility of dependent types?

xtal posted:

Dependent types are p much the best CS invention in my short lifetime. They can theoretically eliminate runtime errors. Making your program total and terminating is sometimes an additional benefit.

xtal posted:

Does anyone know if Typed Racket or Clojure has support for quasi-dependent types? Gradual types seem like a nice compromise to me since you don't need to type absolutely​ everything​, and you can still statically verify them.

rjmccall posted:

I did research on a "practical" dependently-typed language for a year in grad school, and yeah, this was my experience: you spend a lot of time proving basically trivial things. And that was for well-known problems like discussing the length of a list; my experience with trying to prove novel things about real programs (this time in Coq) was that even formulating the types in a way that allowed a proof to proceed was just an unending series of major research problems, which is not a surprise to anybody who's ever done real mathematics, but which constantly seems to surprise the CS folks.

My takeaway was that you should always strive to write code that you could make a rigorous argument about. Having done that, you should then go write good documentation about your preconditions and check them with assertions.

Gnumonic posted:

The anonymous function and squish2 each return a list, not the first item of a sub-list, and I can't understand why the "correct" version of squish doesn't do the same. (i.e. I can't figure out why the output isn't [[1,2,3],whatever] rather than [1,2,3,4,5]). Am I missing something really obvious?

xtal posted:

What is the best language to use on a Raspberry Pi? Haskell runs fine but lens has been compiling for over a day

xtal posted:

Self-quoting for context. How much of a coding horror would it be for me to make a Lisp syntax for Rust using Haskell and parsec?

Asymmetrikon posted:

Well, I'm doing this for C (with intent to create a lot of macros to automatically do generics/monomorphisation/better types/etc.,) so I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't say go for it

Ploft-shell crab posted:

I'm looking at Idris.

Can anyone shed some light on what's going on here:

code:

data Fin : Nat -> Type where
   FZ : Fin (S k)
   FS : Fin k -> Fin (S k)

I think I understand what Fin 5 represents, but what's going on with these constructors??

xtal posted:

Any of you guys hosed with Idris? 1.0 just came out and I want to use it but there's still no package manager...

xtal posted:

Having Idris use a general package manager would be way better than building another package manager for every single language but Nix looks kind of hacky and cruddy tbh