zlacker

>>tymsca+(OP)
It’s really good. But it needs generics. This is a huge downside. It’s a typed and clean functional programming language but it arbitrarily followed golangs early philosophy of no generics. Ironically golang is one of the most hated languages among many fp advocates.

By the developers own action of adding generics ultimately the golang team admits they were wrong or that generics are better. If gleam gets popular I think much of the same will occur.

There’s simply too much repeated code without generics. I tried writing a parser combinator in gleam and it wasn’t pretty.

>>threet+16
Perhaps this is a silly question but how do you do functional with no generics? Arent they pretty much required for map/reduce/filter?

>>kace91+g6
There are multiple levels of possible generics at play here: the container type and the element type. You can have a map/reduce/filter that operate on any element type (generic elements) while still being specialized to linked lists. On the other hand, you might prefer a generic map that can operate on any container type and any element type, so that you can use the same map method and the same function to map over arrays of numbers, sets of numbers, lists of numbers, trees of numbers, or even functions of numbers!

Haskell allows both sorts of generics. In Haskell parlance they call this higher-kinded polymorphism and the generic version of map they call fmap (as a method of the class Functor).