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Comment by irahul | Hacker News Reader

If you use windows or mono is an option, F# is an alternative to Haskell. F# comprises on purity for practicality, and adds a couple of niceties of its own over the ML core. It also allows convenient OOP, but in now way forces to use it if your whole code base is F#.

And if you are using Scheme, Racket is a scheme derivative which provides a nice and extensive library.

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Does F# let you debug using printf? I stopped reading the linked post at that point.

OCaml, on which if I understand it correctly, F# is based, allows you to do that easily, but it's not really natural to do so in this programming languages.

Yes, you could do that. Won't judge that approach - that's probably a cultural thing. But you have access to side effects and could dump stuff to the console (even, if you're so inclined, using the .Net framework standard way, calling Console.Write/WriteLine - although the print* stuff in F# is really better suited if you decided to go down that path).

Yes, printf is easy in F#. The following example works in F# and OCaml:

  let rec fact n =
     Printf.printf "%i\n" n;
     if n = 0 then 1 else n * (fact (n-1))

For the record, this was sarcasm. It's 2012. I really hope you guys aren't debugging using printf still.

You'd think someone into esoteric languages would've heard of a debugger.

I'm pretty good at Haskell and prefer print to debuggers in pretty much every language. I'd rather have the computer produce output for me to read than to have to hand-hold the computer through evaluating my program. It's easier.

The one doesn't replace the other. I wrote a JS debugger for Emacs so as to have a debugger when I wanted one. I still use print statements more.

Print/Trace statements are invaluable in several situations.

I don't trust debuggers for multi-threaded applications or applications with open, time-sensitive resources (open sockets etc..)

Installing and firing up a debugger is not an option in a customer's system.

> It's 2012

I expect to be using Printf's in 2022 and beyond.

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