Ocaml is a bit easier to reason about w.r.t. performance (time/space complexity), and the code is a bit clearer if you're coming in cold after not having seen parts of a codebase for a while. Spent ~10 years at a Haskell shop, and currently at an Ocaml one, and was a Standard ML hacker prior to the Haskell job. Done some F# in there too, although for the most part that just feels like ocaml w/ some cleaned up syntax and a nice interop with the rest of the .net ecosystem.
From a nontechnical perspective, some changes in the Haskell community and ecosystem also turned me off on it starting around 2011, and I find the ocaml one to be a bit more up my alley.
I use ocaml daily for work - our core product is written in it. We actively avoid anything that deviates from the base language for reasons of clarity. No camlp4, no lwt, no fanciness other than some of the batteries libraries that improve on the std library. It does occasionally mean we type in more than we would if, say, we used extensions to give us Haskell-like do notation for monadic code, but at the end of the day we err on the side of being very conservative.
You sound like you’re just not the target audience. That doesn’t make it bad. I personally welcome more specialized news aggregator sites. HN is too diluted and a bit of a fad-following monoculture. This kind of site looks refreshing.
I think I got bit by that last night - working with sound in Mathematica, a simple MIDI tune was playing and then my MBP made a horrendously loud noise. Didn't damage the speakers, which surprised me given how loud it was. Probably the fastest I've mashed CMD-Q to quit a program though.
The Fortran language defines a pretty clean FFI to bind to other languages. It’s not really any harder than binding to C code, which is why it’s called BIND(C) and ISO_C_BINDING. That was introduced in F03. The only period when it was murky how to interoperate was in the 90s and early 00s when compiler vendors had their own array descriptor structures that didn’t agree with each other. I worked on a language interop tool back then and spent way more time than I’d have liked reverse engineering those undocumented data structures for all of the compilers at the time.
Posting on arxiv is useful for making results available early, and to make published work available in some form that isn’t pay walled, but posting on arxiv on its own is not publishing as it isn’t peer reviewed.
Nope. Nobody in the review or author role gets paid. And personally, that doesn’t bother me. I put in time to review papers with the understanding that someone else will put in time to review mine. My employer (I’m in industry) understands that this is a reasonable use of my time given that they see value in me being engaged in the academic world. Prior to industry when I was an academic, it was also part of my paid job. It’s usually called service. The trope that it’s all unpaid labor is a bit deceiving and not entirely accurate.
I don't understand why academics seem so complacent in this. Sure I'm perfectly happy to do "service" for a community of researchers who run an open access journal or are organizing a conference. That's a beautiful system. When it's for a for-profit publisher that will charge those not working at a well funded academic institution extortionate fees to access my work , or the work I'm reviewing, it's a whole different story.
You've misunderstood the person you are replying to. The insinuation was not that the labor is unpaid, the insinuation is that the labor is paid for by someone other than the publisher.
The ultimate point being that the group that pays for the labor does not get the benefit of the labor: each member of the public must individually pay for access to the article. This situation is absurd: they have already paid for the article's production.
This is why the most powerful open access initiatives are being driven by grant agencies. They are in a position to unequivocally state that the research they are paying for must be open to the public since they grant the money on behalf of that very same public.
The problem isn’t technical. The current flaws in the publishing system are not due to lack of indexing, data distribution, provenance, or filtering. And please, please, please, don’t turn reviews into some user driven drivel like amazon product reviews or other systems that are easily gamed or prone to the whims of the masses. We already have problems with gaming and personal agendas making reviews less than impartial: don’t make something that makes it 10x worse. (CS academic publishing and refereeing for 20+ years here).
Same for my PhD advisor and current/past students. Unfortunately, this HN post seems to be full of the usual cohort of passionately opinionated HN readers who don’t have a deep understanding about that which they’re passionately opinionated about.
From a nontechnical perspective, some changes in the Haskell community and ecosystem also turned me off on it starting around 2011, and I find the ocaml one to be a bit more up my alley.