Re: [Caml-list] Re: Why OCaml sucks

[Matthew William Cox <matt@mattcox.ca>]

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On Fri, May 09, 2008 at 01:39:54AM +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:
> Brian Hurt recently published...
> 
> 3. Lack of multi-file modules: I have never found this to be a
> problem. Nor do I find filenames implying module names to be a
> problem, as many SML advocates seem to believe (yes, both of them ;-).

I would add a 3a: the inability to have a "root"-level functor. As it
stands, all functors are (sometimes naturally, sometimes not) embedded
in a "root" module. I'm looking at you, Map.Make. You too, Set.Make.

> 4. Mutable data: I believe the exact opposite. The ability to drop down to 
> mutable data structures for performance without leaving the language is 
> essential and the ability to predict memory consumption is essential, both of 
> which Haskell lacks. Consequently, Haskell's inability to handle mutation 
> efficiently and safely have doomed it to failure for practical applications.

Well, in fairness, there's always the ST monad. However, the rank-2
polymorphism involved is nontrivial, and I agree with you [Jon.]

> 5. Strings: pushing unicode throughout a general purpose language is a 
> mistake, IMHO. This is why languages like Java and C# are so slow.

This is simply ridiculous. Using heavy-weight unicode-aware functions
for character operations may slow down string-intensive operations in
those languages, but the only alternative is to be broken. See items 3
and 4 here:

http://www.moserware.com/2008/02/does-your-code-pass-turkey-test.html

In both cases, we need locale-aware character processing. That means
Unicode these days. Unless you code your own routines for processing
every 8-bit character set out there. I don't.

> 6. Shift-reduce conflicts: although there as aspects of OCaml's syntax that I 
> would like to tweak (e.g. adding an optional "end" after a "match" 
> or "function" to make them easier to nest), I am not bother about the 
> shift-reduce conflicts. Mainstream languages get by with far more serious 
> syntactic issues (like <<...>> in C++).

I've been bitten by exactly these sorts of problems. Sometimes I get an
obscure type error, sometimes I don't. I've just gotten used to not
placing a match-like construct in the middle of a sequence expression
when I can avoid it.

> 8. Exceptions: I love OCaml's extremely fast exception handling (6x faster 
> than C++, 30x faster than Java and 600x faster than C#/F#!). I hate 
> the "exceptions are for exceptional circumstances" line promoted by the 
> advocates of any language implementation with cripplingly-slow exception 
> handlers. I really miss fast exception handling in F#. Brian gives an example 
> of exception handling with recursive IO functions failing to be tail 
> recursive here and advocates option types. But recursion is the wrong tool 
> for the job here and option types are even worse. You should use mutation 
> and, failing that, CPS.

I suspect his reaction to exceptions comes from an unfamiliarity with
their uses in Ocaml. In C++/Java land, the gospel is to only use them
for exceptional circumstances. In the case of C++, this is probably
because of the difficulty of writing exception-safe code: if you're
going to throw an exception, your code is likely going to be broken as
a result. As a result, exceptions seem to be reserved for situations
where normal processing must terminate anyways.

> 9. Deforestation: Brian says "Haskell has introduced a very interesting and 
> (to my knowledge) unique layer of optimization, called deforrestation". True, 
> of course, but useless theoretical piffle because we know that Haskell is 
> slow in practice and prohibitively difficult to optimize to-boot. Deforesting 
> is really easy to do by hand.

Yes, its easy to do by hand. It's also time consuming. Don't you make a
living off ocaml? I'm surprised you can justify using your time on such a
mechanical task. Granted, deforesting something like map f . map g into
map (f . g) is trivial, but we can come up with both trivial and
nontrivial examples for almost anything.

Cheers,
Matt

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