ML: the ``MeLanin scholars'' of programming

https://twitter.com/leonidasfromxiv/status/589766936420085760

Every time someone excuses C for being 60ies tech: C debuted in 1972. ML solves many issues and debuted one year later (!).

https://twitter.com/rob_rix/status/678571907227119617

It's pretty incredible just how much ML got right, way back in 1973.

It's even more incredible just how much ML got wrong, way back in 1980.

There was no pattern matching. Instead you had to check for nil and take the head and tail like Lisp. References weren't first-class. Exceptions were done wrong. There was no module system.

One of these ``MeLanin scholars'' had the arrogance to say that Luca Cardelli had no knowledge of ML when he worked on Modula-3. Cardelli was one of the people who worked on the pattern matching and the module system in ML in the first place!

Everything that they say is an ML advantage existed in other languages in 1980. The ML community is like some of those African tribes. Missionaries teach them something and leave for a few years. When they return, they tribe tells the missionaries it was the other way around.

Like knowlege learned from missionaries and passed down orally by an African tribe, the ML rip-offs are not only more recently absorbed into their culture, but distorted and inferior to the original sources of knowledge.

>>1
I love posts like this, it's so funny how you related it to missionaries because it's exactly right too.

I do not like pattern matching bullshit in Haskell, and I do not like the concept. Therefore, I did not read the rest of your post.

>>3
What do you like to use in place of pattern matching, then? Or are you just an angsty kid who doesn't like everything and everyone?

>>4
I do things manually.

>>5
/s/manually/anally/

Man-anally.

https://twitter.com/CodaFi_/status/518515850434056193

Everybody from Haskell to Swift to C++ to Java is looking back 40 years. Not to C or Pascal or BASIC, but to ML.

https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/601132576997134337

C and ML were both finished in 73. ML had first-class functions, GC, type inference, algebraic data types, pattern matching, and exceptions.

>>1
I find this sort of boasting about one's favorite language being there first absolutely hilarious on a deep level (even ignoring the ignorance of the finer details you pointed out), because how do you even think that it's a good idea to respond to "your language sucks, nobody uses it, it came last" with "but it had the head start"? That means that it sucks epically, right? If Lisp had fifty years to take over the world and failed, then it's unimaginably worse than PHP that did it in five years?

I guess this sort of contradiction is actually not a hindrance but precisely the engine that powers destructive cults. Because it is from this contradiction they derive the conclusion that the world is wrong and they are the only one who see the Truth. Like, it is not that ML sucks, it's all those programmers who write useful software in C actually suck compared to our ML master, because he uses ML for his fibs and facs and they don't.

Compare, for example, to how Nazis are animated by the contradiction between a) the Jews rule the world while the Aryans are oppressed, and b) the Aryans are the master race while the Jews are inferior degenerates. Every time these two contradictory statements come close in their heads, sparks fly and they shake and sputter and rage.

>>9
Good work goy, I have deposited 0.01 shekel into your account.

t Jewberg Shekelstein

>>10
Is this supposed to be funny or offensive? Try harder.

>>11
Is that supposed to be a question.

>>11
Nice dubs!