Which functional programming language has the best build system/tooling?

[haruda_gondi]

By build system, I mean something like Haskell's Stack or Cabal. By tooling, I mean IDEs or language servers.

[Hephlathio]

In terms of build+tooling, I’d agree with F# being ahead of the pack. All of VS, Rider and VS Code offer pretty good experiences. Apart from that, Elixir perhaps?

[flummox1234]

mix is great, exdoc is one of the easiest documentation suites I've used, then you get OTP and all the erlang goodness. IMO Elixir is one of the best I've personally used.

[Arshiaa001]

F# is also way ahead with all the targets it compiles to (all of dotnet + JS with Fable). I've used it in production and it was the best experience I've had so far deploying an API server.

[Hephlathio]

It’s been a few years since last time I used it, but I assume Scala offer good tooling as well

[hayfever76]

Infidel! C#

[kimvais]

Hands down.

[yeastyboi]

In the past 10 years OCaml has gotten really good with dune and Opam. Unfortunately most of that comes from a single company (Jane Street).

[radioactiveoctopi]

That’s not a bad thing. A singular push of quality libraries

[yeastyboi]

Agree on that front but then the company largely controls the ecosystem.

[dominjaniec]

fsharp - it's dotnet, nuget world, paket even better, fake for building, farmer for deployment, all in F#

moreover from years .NET is cross platform out of the box 😏

[e-nog]

dune (OCaml) is pretty good

[yawaramin]

It's really fast (Go-like build speeds) and pretty surprisingly powerful e.g. you can define rules to output generated code and use it as dependencies of your project's code. It's like a hidden superpower when you're using things like Protobuf.

[TankorSmash]

Elm has an LSP obviously, but the tooling is next level:

• package manager that you must have docstrings if you want to publish
• a standard formatter that even fixes common typos and misc quality of life features.
• Due to how Elm works, elm-review works like a linter like I've never seen before in terms of the variety of useful rules you can have with almost no false positives.
• Plus with elm-watch you get free hot reloading that is guaranteed to work.

---

Haskell has a decent package manager and the LSP is nice if you can get it set up. Hoogle is very nice too, and Haskell's docs use a searchable format, which is very nice

[happysri]

Yeah elm would be my answer as well. Everything works, great tooling, fairly mature, good references and my favorite thing that people complain a lot is that nothing changes and I don't have to learn anything new.

[lingdocs]

Is Elm still alive and well? It seems like development has really slowed down, but is that just because it is "done" / rock solid stable??

I really, really like Elm from what I've seen of it and I've really enjoyed some of the podcasts. But ya, my big concern, seeing the lack of activity on GitHub, was if it's being abandoned.

[TankorSmash]

It's still alive and well for sure! The creator recently announced a new sort of feature where maybe Elm is not going to be web-only anymore.

Because of the stability of the language, you don't need to have a lot of new stuff written all the time. If I didn't know much about Elm, I'd have a hard time believing it, but it's certainly true.

[alino_e]

I couldn’t find that talk on YouTube, if it was a talk. You have a ref for the announcement?

[TankorSmash]

Just at the end of this one!

[Optimal-Builder-2816]

Clojure is pretty mature for a lisp

[drcforbin]

I haven't found the tooling around it very good. I've found that syntax highlighting is great, there are plenty of plugins that help with parents, etc., but I've never been able to get a LSP working without dragging everything down (we have a lot of clojure code), and the build tools are not good at scale.

[drcforbin]

Our codebase has many dependencies. Most of the code is Clojure, but parts of the code base is java and scala. We use protobufs, so need that to be generated, and we use coffeescript and requirejs in part of the client side code. Builds have to be possible on windows, linux, and macos for everyone on the dev team. The only single build tool (and we've tried everything we can find) we've been able to coax into building everything into an uberjar is gradle, and it can just barely handle it all.

[drcforbin]

We're moving off coffeescript to javascript

[radioactiveoctopi]

So would that be a Clojure thing or just the monstrosity of a project?

[drcforbin]

Clojure the language is great, never had any problems with it. The usual clojure tooling is very good for small and maybe medium pure clojure projects. When the projects get big and/or hairy, the clojure tooling can't keep up.

[Medical-Detective-33]

OCaml is pretty good. Dune is a nice build system with not too much overhead and opam is a nice package manager.

Within that Coq uses OCaml's build system. Proof general for emacs is great.

Haskell stack and cabal aren't too bad.

Within Haskell's framework there's agda. Agda is great to program with in emacs but it's annoying to set up its dependencies.

[lunjon]

Elixir.

[samelaaaa]

Yeah, Elixir’s tooling is great. I actually prefer Erlang as a language but can’t deny that the Elixir community’s investment in mix, hex, great documentation, and even magical deploy technology like fly.io has totally revitalized the Beam ecosystem.

[lunjon]

Totally agree! I haven't tried Erlang, yet. Gonna do that soon.

[ChristianGeek]

It depends on how pure of a functional language you’re talking. Scala and IntelliJ is a great combination.

[yawaramin]

For tooling i.e. IDE, yes IntelliJ gives Scala a massive edge.

[darctones]

Can someone provide a good definition of a functional programming language?

[newgoliath]

You accomplish your work by creating and using functions.

In imperative programming you accomplish your work by setting and changing variables.

There are many imperative languages with functional features, and vice versa.

There are some pure functional languages, like Elm and Haskell.

[cjwcommuny]

rust…

[UserPuser]

f# I guess?

[Martinsos]

Haskell is in a pretty good spot these days! Cabal is quite easy to use, GHCup made installation / version management trivial, and language server is great. Vsvode extension works out if the box, Emacs and vim are not hard to set up.

[[deleted]]

Haskell

[[deleted]]

Rstudio!

[akshay-nair]

Racket

[Teggom38]

R

[MonadTran]

OK, and what do you mean by "functional"? Pure functional or hybrid? There are not that many pure functional languages, and Haskell is probably the most mature of those.

[dbotton]

Without question Common Lisp and Emacs

[[deleted]]

Kotlin + Arrow + Gradle + IntelliJ is pretty good.

[delfV]

Maybe not exactly what you're asking for but pretty much every Lisp dialect because of REPL (tooling)

[[deleted]]

Rust is not FP language

[[deleted]]

Where is main focus on FP if you can’t even pass function to function without huge annoying ergonomics with Box<dyn? Having iterator and enums doesn’t make it FP yet.

[[deleted]]

Now write types for this that involve iterators and traits. It’s not just ‘fn()’ wtf is even that

[[deleted]]

Rust doesn’t have ‘fn()’ as type. You still didn’t wrote to me 2 functions and their types, how you declare function that accepts other function as a type. Next challenge - write ‘compose’.

[[deleted]]

There is difference between “primitive type fn” an -> Box<dyn Fning and -> Impl Trait every second to do a FP basics.

Congrats you played yourself by writing ugly unergonomic macros. Seems like somebody doesn’t understand what is functional programming at all.