I got into ocaml recently. I love it. I honestly don’t see issues with the syntax, maybe because I haven’t used it enough.

From a quick look into XMPP’s clients for android, they seem nice and some have modern features too.

Is there any technical limitation that would prevent xmpp client from having a WhatsApp-like UI?? WhatsApp started out with XMPP and probably still uses a variant of it. If anything, I’d imagine its harder with matrix given the complexity of the protocol.

Makes sense, but to me newness alone is not a benefit. In fact, it is a bit of a disadvantage. XMPP has more clients for example, and they are more mature.

Any examples other than ocaml? From my understanding, ocaml’s type strength may only be found in a couple other languages. Haskell, scala, and maybe Rust. Any others?

Comparing cost to AWS Aurora is unfair. Give us the self host price, and compare to that.

Also, they should have tried Scylla or Cassandra. It’s very scalable and handles a lot of writes.

I won’t remember everything, but one very important things comes to mind:

in Typescript, it is very difficult to assert on a type (let me know if you’re not familiar with what I mean by this and I can explain further). In OCaml, this is trivial using pattern matching.

Why would you need that? The idea of a type system is it doesn’t let you apply a function on a structure without the structure being of the right type. But the lack of type assertion in TS makes people follow hacky workarounds, which defeat the purpose of type system.

There are a couple of other things, like immutable types by default, automatic tail call optimization, functors enabling higher kinded types, etc.

Also in ocaml, you don’t have to annotate any types on any variable or parameter, and you’ll still get full type protection.

The only valid argument against typescript is that it is too similar to vanilla JavaScript. It does not go far enough. We need type systems like Ocaml’s.

I suppose you can also complain about needing a build step, but I find this silly. There are so many tools that make this easy or automatic.

I love Raku (formerly perl 6) for this purpose as well.

Are the differences between racket and guile significant?

Had to scroll far to find this. Love Scala!

Never heard of the last two. Can you tell us more?

What would be the appeal of small talk, or a smalltalk-like language?

Well some of these seem less known (which I am interested in). I only know python and zsh. I’ve heard of bum. Can you tell us more, and why you like them?

In nodejs, at least, it does. The minification and tree-shaking can make code significantly smaller. This can mean smaller cold start time in AWS Lambda for example, or just overall a little less RAM. If your heap isn’t that large, that can be noticeable.

It also eliminates the filesystem overhead of resolving and loading modules.

The size of the code still impacts your deployment. Moreover, if you’re using something like AWS lambda, small changes can have significant influence on cold start time.

I agree that an extra step is not desirable, but this would only be done for production deployments (and consequently pre-prod if you do that).

Ideally you’d only do this for live deployments (production and possibly pre-production or staging / QA). For all other testing, you would keep it unbundled.

Scala has some of that effect too.

My experience with gentoo docker images is that they’re pretty big. I’m not sure why. Maybe the build system or the python deps make it big. I tried squashing the image layers and it was still big, so it isn’t that.

No

Isn’t Babel part of the build step? I might not be misunderstanding with what you mean by build step here.

In general, you probably can’t avoid a bundler for the browser without significant compromises on performance and developer experience.