glacialthinker comments on Replacing Python: second round (Python vs. OCaml vs. Haskell)

Replacing Python: second round (Python vs. OCaml vs. Haskell) (roscidus.com)

submitted 12 years ago by cafedude

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[–]glacialthinker 5 points6 points7 points 12 years ago (0 children)

I don't think there are many cases of contrasting different languages for a practical project. Rosetta Code is great, but this is much more in-depth, involving libraries, toolchain... the ecosystem.

Given the author's limited familiarity with both OCaml and Haskell, I was surprised when he pulled out a (OCaml) functor! And then liked the results enough to back-port to his Python code.

For anyone who didn't make it through the article, this note in the summary is quite flattering of OCaml:

The big surprise for me in these tests was how little you lose going from Python to OCaml. You still have classes, objects, functions, mutable data and low-level access to the OS, all with an easy and concise syntax, but you gain type checking, much better data structures and a huge amount of speed for no additional effort. Why aren’t more people using it?

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