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Comment by yawn | Hacker News Reader

Totally agree on 2. "Learn a language a year" they said. "Learning new languages expands your thinking" they said. What they didn't say was that once you use ADTs to model data, Maybe/Option types to avoid null, exhaustive pattern matching, etc, you want those features in all the languages you use.

I don't ask for much. I just want a GC'd Rust (one of the few modern languages that has option types in the std lib) or an F# that isn't tied to the .NET standard lib. Please?

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I think Swift is the closest thing to a GC’d Rust. However, since Windows isn’t a first class platform for Swift, I’d recommend checking out Scala.

I think they’re doing a compiler rewrite that steals the good ideas from Rust (like good error messages).

> F# that isn't tied to the .NET standard lib. Please?

F# is basically OCaml on .Net, so… OCaml?

I just made this choice (learn fsharp or oval). initially I was leaning ocaml for the same reason as gp but then I tried a simple scraper (make a get request and parse the HTML) and couldn't get it to compile because of cabal hell. well obviously not cabal hell but dependency hell where I had to keep changing installing and uninstalling versions of cohttp and the compiler. in the end I said screw it and installed all the .net/mono/f# stuff and it worked flawlessly the first time. I don't understand how language developers don't prioritize package management in 2018 - it's simply a deal breaker when other languages get it right. yes I realize ocaml and haksell have a different perspective on dependency resolution than other languages but then they should ensure that it works (and yes I also realize dependency resolution is np complete).

It can happen if you happen to install a recent compiler and that package manager has not done the work(probably changing the bounds) to update in opam repo.

> I don't understand how language developers don't prioritize package management in 2018

As you already know, Ocaml already has a decent package manager opam, this same situation will happen in any language where the packages get stale(e.g. in rust you installed something used nightly features that didn't make it mainstream).

The tooling around OCaml is nowhere near F#, let alone Rust. The standard library situation is less than ideal and they're still working on getting multithread support.

What tooling is absent?

OCaml? ReasonML?

In regards to 2: I find it difficult sometimes to work with a language that doesn't have Elixir/Erlang's pattern matching, and sometimes I wish I hadn't learned about it...

(the pipe operator is another favorite I miss often)

There are proposals to add |> (pipe) to JS.

I actually stopped learning new languages with these features because I started to get so frustrated they weren't available. Or I implemented then am everyone got weirded out by their 'strangeness'

Terrible idea: could you write a transpiler for rust that basically auto-wrapped everything in a Gc<> type and auto-dereferenced?

OCaml?

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