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Comment by htor | Hacker News Reader

"C has the fastest development interactivity of any mainstream statically typed language."

This is not true. Using debuggers and crash dumps to reason about your running program is not fast or interactive at all. It doesn't matter how good the tools are. They interrupt the workflow.

Working in a REPL on the other hand, is real interaction with your program. You speak the language to the program and the program responds in the same language. This is fast.

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> Using debuggers and crash dumps to reason about your running program is not fast or interactive at all.

Says you. Using core dumps is a different kind of interactive. Rather than testing out what a program would do or could do (as in a REPL), you're iterating on theories of what it did do. It definitely takes getting used to, but I'm often much faster debugging (even non-fatal problems) from a core file than iterating with a step-through debugger or rerunning the program.

It also helps a lot when the tools within the core dump debugger are good -- you should be able to quickly dump what's relevant to your program (not just threads and stacks and individual objects).

But he said "mainstream statically typed language". Is there one such with a REPL?

Would Scala be mainstream? OCaml or Haskell probably not.

Yes, I'd say Haskell and ML are mainstream languages by now.

Well, we can debate how mainstream Haskell is, but especially if you mean ML in the sense that does not include also OCaml, then ML definitely is not a mainstream language.

OCaml might be mainstream to armchair FP developers on HN and language theorists at Facebook, but it remains a fairly unpopular choice for developing software outside academia. Even Haskell is pretty unpopular relative to the amount of software developed daily.

Random anecdata, my coworker used to do a lot of work with OCaml.

How many companies are basing their businesses on Haskell?

I'm thinking fuckall, but it's always good to know.

https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry

https://www.fpcomplete.com/business/resources/case-studies/

http://engineering.silk.co/post/31920990633/why-we-use-haske...

http://bos.github.io/strange-loop-2011/talk/talk.html#%281%2...

http://www.quora.com/What-startups-use-Haskell-for-productio...

http://www.quora.com/To-what-extent-do-people-use-Haskell-at...

https://angel.co/haskell/jobs

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-largest-commercial-program-...

http://janrain.com/blog/haskell-janrain/

http://functionaljobs.com/

http://www.haskellers.com/jobs

And I've noticed "haskell" at least being listed in job postings more lately:

http://www.dice.com/job/results?caller=basic&q=haskell&x=all...

> I'm thinking fuckall, but it's always good to know.

Such genuine curiosity.

True, but that's an argument to move on to other, less popular (for now) statically typed languages which are better than C and have REPLs.

We could debate whether it's wise to move on from C (I think in many situations it is), whether it's likely there will be more industry adoption of $MY_FAVORITE_LANGUAGE, but that's a different debate.

Also, if we keep favoring C (or Java, or whatever) because they are mainstream, then other languages will never become mainstream, and we will be stuck forever coding in horrible languages. Who wants that?

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