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Comment by catgary | Hacker News Reader

I kind of agree that Haskell missed its window, and a big part of the problem is the academic-heavy ecosystem (everyone is doing great work, but there is a difference between academic and industrial code).

I’m personally quite interested in the Koka language. It has some novel ideas (functional-but-in-place algorithms, effect-handler-aware compilation, it uses reference counting rather than garbage collection) and is a Microsoft Research project. It’s starting to look more and more like an actual production-ready language. I can daydream about Microsoft throwing support behind it, along with some tooling to add some sort of Koka-Rust interoperability.

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Koka is indeed incredibly cool, but:

It sees sporadic bursts of activity, probably when an intern is working on it, and otherwise remains mostly dormant. There is no package manager that could facilitate ecosystem growth. There is no effort to market and popularize it.

I believe it is fated to remain a research language indefinitely.

You’re probably right. I just think it’s the only real candidate for a functional language that could enter the zeitgeist like Rust or Swift did, it’s a research language that has been percolating at Microsoft for some time. A new language requires a major company’s support, and they should build an industry-grade ecosystem for at least one problem domain.

F# exists

Yups. And that's about it for F#. One can await the announcement that MSFT stops maintaining it.

People have been predicting the imminent demise of F# since its first version 20 years ago.

A lot of major C# features were first implemented in F#. I think of it as a place for Microsoft engineers/researchers to be more experimental with novel features that still need to target the CLR (the dotnet VM). Sometimes even requiring changes to the CLR itself. In that lens, it has had a very large indirect financial impact on the dotnet ecosystem.

I keep (seems mistakenly) expecting them to try and push F# along with their dotnet ML tooling more since, while it is strictly typed, F# lets you mostly avoid making your types explicit so exploration of ideas in code is closer to Python than it is to c# while giving you the benefits of a type system and lots of functional goodies.

I'm just now discovering Koka. I'm kinda blown away.

I'm also a little sad at this defeatist attitude. What you said might be true, but those things are solvable problems. Just requires a coordinated force of will from a few dedicated individuals.

Be the change you want to see?

Hear, hear!

There is a team of dedicated people working on Koka. They say the language isn’t production ready, and they don’t seem to be rushing. But I don’t think they’d bother with VSCode/IDE support if they didn’t feel like they were getting close.

A big if, granted, but if roc delivers on its promises it could also be a pretty compelling language — maybe a bit too niche for super enterprisey stuff but it could definitely have a zeitgeisty moment.

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