> It's actually more of a sibling in the family who ran away from home at the age of 6 and fell in with the crowd on the wrong side of the tracks.
> Initially Rust was very much like ocaml. It isn't anymore :) Many of the normally-in-functional-languages features in Rust come from these days. Others were lost and re-added later. It's a very complex history.
Yeah, having tried Rust in those days, I kinda stopped when it broke every week, and was then surprised with the surface of 1.0. It seemed like a different person to talk to.
I've made my peace with the C'ification of Rust as the price to pay for attracting a large crowd of developers who grew up with C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, the list goes on. It's a reasonable sacrifice to make, but the two mentioned basic features aren't complex things to wish for.
> could you elaborate? I'm not familiar with this feature (only have dabbled in sml).
Imagine being able to hoist your match clauses into function head (signature?).
oldEnoughToDrink :: Int -> Boolean
oldEnoughToDrink 21 -> True
oldEnoughToDrink _ -> False
Not all languages with support for that force you to repeat the function name, and there are good arguments for/against. For example in Erlang, when you define an anonymous function, you do not repeat it:
OldEnough = fun(21) -> true;
(_) -> false
end,
Now, this may seem like a stupid little feature, but trust me when I say it's a natural feature to use like recursive functions after you're used to it.
> Initially Rust was very much like ocaml. It isn't anymore :) Many of the normally-in-functional-languages features in Rust come from these days. Others were lost and re-added later. It's a very complex history.
Yeah, having tried Rust in those days, I kinda stopped when it broke every week, and was then surprised with the surface of 1.0. It seemed like a different person to talk to.
I've made my peace with the C'ification of Rust as the price to pay for attracting a large crowd of developers who grew up with C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, the list goes on. It's a reasonable sacrifice to make, but the two mentioned basic features aren't complex things to wish for.
> could you elaborate? I'm not familiar with this feature (only have dabbled in sml).
Imagine being able to hoist your match clauses into function head (signature?).
Not all languages with support for that force you to repeat the function name, and there are good arguments for/against. For example in Erlang, when you define an anonymous function, you do not repeat it: Now, this may seem like a stupid little feature, but trust me when I say it's a natural feature to use like recursive functions after you're used to it.