> It makes some kinds of code nicer, but doesn't significantly affect the expressiveness or capability of the language.
Sum types and exhaustive pattern matching aren't about expressiveness, they're tools for aiding code comprehension by increasing the locality of code that has no business being distributed into completely different classes, and decreasing the cost of making changes by heavily reducing the amount of test code that needs to be written to make sure a closed set of options is handled appropiately; in OOP languages you can get this by using interfaces but to make use of it you'd have to use huge classes with methods pertaining to every usage of this closed set.
I would never willingly pick up another language that doesn't provide me with them after experiencing the productivity gains. I really like the direction Dart is moving towards and the steps taken demonstrate there's a team behind it that cares about correctness and productivity over being just a familiar Java-like, but this is the one hard blocker for me.
> they're tools for aiding code comprehension by increasing the locality of code that has no business being distributed into completely different classes
That's true for some kinds of code but not others. This is the classic Expression Problem [0]. For some things, it makes sense to keep all of the code for a single operation together. For others, it makes more sense to keep all of the code for a single datatype together. ML-style languages optimize for the former, and object-oriented languages optimize for the latter.
In practice, for the kinds of code Dart is designed for, the latter is a better fit most of the time. There's a reason OO and UI have been married together for decades.
Ideally, a language provides both styles so you can choose the one that fits your problem best. You see that now with languages like Scala. I hope we get there with Dart too.
I don't think it's fair to say that subclassing and method dispatch is objectively wrong just because it's a bad fit for some kinds of code. (Though, naturally, if it's a bad fit for the kind of code you need to write, then an OO language might be an objectively bad choice for you.) Class-based method dispatch is annoying for some things (God knows I've written enough Visitor pattern implementations over object-oriented AST class hierarchies), but it's really beautiful for others.
Being able to define a new widget class that bundles its rendering and interaction behavior together and can seamlessly extend a UI framework is something so natural that we take it for granted, but is very difficult to express in a language like SML. In fact, in order to do it, you'll probably end up doing a "design pattern" that reimplements something like v-tables at the application level.
Not sure if I gave off the wrong impression, but I am not a proponent of having only sum types and discarding hierarchies; as you well mentioned each is well-suited to specific usecases.
I do however disagree on subclassing being the best fit for UI code. "The Elm architecture" as well as the model presented by React functional components with hooks offer sets of tradeoffs that I at least have found are better for most of the development I find myself doing when writing (and particularly when maintaining) regular business frontends.
> There's a reason OO and UI have been married together for decades.
People repeat this a lot, that OO goes with UI, but I don't think it's actually true, and I think e.g. React Hooks and immediate mode GUI in general demonstrate that it's not true. OO has been coupled with UI out of inertia, not because OO has unique strengths when applied to UI.
Sum types are a primitive language feature, akin to product types, which absolutely no one rejects the value of. The sum/product analogy to arithmetic is compelling to me: they are the building blocks of complex types and deserve recognition. I think that "zen koan" you mentioned earlier is being very generous to subclassing. You want ADTs most of the time!
> People repeat this a lot, that OO goes with UI, but I don't think it's actually true
It is evidentially true. Thousands of successful applications and a billions of lines of UI code have been written in object oriented languages. It does work and it can't be that bad if that's continuing to happen even after the emergence of other alternatives.
Whether there are better ways is a good question, but I think it's pretty clear that you can ship good apps using OOP for your UI.
> React Hooks and immediate mode GUI in general demonstrate that it's not true.
I'm far enough into my career now — I've been doing UI programming of one form or another since the 90s — to have seen that pendulum swing several times. If there is a silver bullet, we haven't found it. It's probably not immediate mode GUIs because if it was, I wouldn't have seen game teams tear them out to replace them with something more retained several times in the 2000s.
What I think actually happens is that we forget the problems lurking in the solution we are not currently using. The grass over there gets greener and greener until we hop the fence and the cycle starts over. Incremental progress does happen. (I am not keen to revisit MFC any time soon.) But if a given concept (1) has been around a long time (2) has not already supplanted the alternatives, it's pretty unlikely that it is now an amazing solution today. The only time when that isn't true is when the surrounding technology context has changed since then.
For example, neural nets weren't a good solution for AI problems in the 80s because compute was too expensive and we didn't have a lot of data. Now that CPUs are cheap and everyone puts their entire life on the Internet, machine learning is here.
I haven't seen anything around UIs that to me looks like a significantly changed context, so I think we're still orbiting around retained-mode and immediate-mode as both having their own trade-offs and neither being a slam dunk.
> I think that "zen koan" you mentioned earlier is being very generous to subclassing. You want ADTs most of the time!
I really don't think that's true. Just look out there in the world. More code is written in languages doing subclassing every day than in languages with sum types. Despite the fact that sum types have been around since the 70s. You have to have a very uncharitable opinion of all of your fellow programmers to believe they've all been getting this wrong for decades. Heck, the software you are using right now to read this comment is sitting on a stack of several layers of subclass-based architectures! You've got JS running on top of the DOM inside a browser written in C++.
Sum types are really nice. But open-ended subclassing is too.
I wanna hear more open discussion about immediate & retained mode approach.
For one imgui gains traction again, especially among game developers, simply as it gives a lot for the ease of compile, understanding, compactness of code, etc. You can really build complex tools out of it.
But there is one nasty elephnant - the state, and imgui's approach is to hide it somehow - it used be behind your __LINE__ (or __COUNTER__, stack.line in some langs), or maybe part of your label points to your data, and if you've had the bad luck of having same labeled names, then there is yet another workaround, something special hidden in there.
All in all, it seems like it's missing a language feature, and we are suddenly grasping on all kinds of tweaks to achieve that.
That, .. and layout.. Layout is damn hard in immediate language. It works by magic, and then your app might crash, and lock. No I'm not kiddin...
Then again I'm but a simple user of UI toolkits, never fully written one.
First, I just want to say that I use Dart pretty regularly now and enjoy the language. I don't want to come across as overly negative; Dart is a solid language that's made web programming a lot more fun for me. So thank you, and everyone else on the Dart team for the hard work!
I just want to address these lines:
> Thousands of successful applications and a billions of lines of UI code have been written in object oriented languages.
> More code is written in languages doing subclassing every day than in languages with sum types. Despite the fact that sum types have been around since the 70s. You have to have a very uncharitable opinion of all of your fellow programmers to believe they've all been getting this wrong for decades.
I agree that there's a huge amount of code out there using subclassing and not sum types. I'm not disputing the utility of subclassing; I just think the analogy to arithmetic is compelling, in that a closed sum type is a more primitive notion than open ended subclassing. It's easier to describe what a sum type is than what a subclass is; sum types have a smaller impact on a type system than subclassing. Pretty much any metric you can think of, sum types are just simpler, and more widely applicable. Any time you are describing a data structure, an ADT is immediately useful; subtyping may or may not be useful and is always more complicated. It's very difficult for me to understand how anyone could possibly say subtyping is on the same level as a basic operation like addition. Subclassing may or may not be nice but sum types are a primitive in a way that subclassing simply cannot be.
I don't know how to break it down more than this: we already have multiplication of types, and everyone accepts this as a primitive. Well, you can also do addition of types! Multiplication, addition, a neat little pair, just like algebra class[0]. Subclassing is way more complicated than this. That's it, that's a bullet proof argument as far as I'm concerned.
I suppose I do have an uncharitable opinion of mainstream programming languages, because I do think they've been getting this wrong for decades. It's nothing personal, it's just that industry has other concerns besides how clean their languages are. My browser being written in C++ is not an argument in favor of subclassing, though. You can build anything out of toothpicks if you're paid enough.
> I just think the analogy to arithmetic is compelling, in that a closed sum type is a more primitive notion than open ending subclassing.
I agree, sum types have a real beautiful elegance. But I often wonder if that's some sort of "appeal to mathematical aesthetics" fallacy. When I see, for example, painters deciding what brushes to use, I don't see them choosing brushes whose diameter follows the Fibonacci sequence or something.
Simplicity is a virtue because it lowers the cognitive load of a language. I don't know if mapping something to arithmetic tells us something actually profound about the productivity of a language feature, even if it gives me a little shiver of delight when I think about it.
> Any time you are describing a data structure, an ADT is immediately useful
For what it's worth, I often run into problems where I think I can map something to a nice set of ADTs but then it ends up still having ugly corners. As elegant as the language feels, when I use them in practice my code is still awkward sometimes.
> It's very difficult for me to understand how anyone could possibly say subtyping is on the same level as basic operation like addition, one of them is clearly a more basic idea.
Subtyping is set theory, and sets are obviously more fundamental than arithmetic! :D
> we already have multiplication of types, and everyone accepts this as a primitive.
Well, actually, lots of languages don't have tuples and records/structs aren't simple product types.
> I suppose I do have an uncharitable opinion of mainstream programming languages
I wasn't talking about languages I was talking about people. There are languages out there with all of the features you describe. Yet millions of people are choosing other languages. You must have an uncharitable view of those people if you presume that all of them are making a choice that goes against their own self-interest to be happy productive programmers.
> Subtyping is set theory, and sets are obviously more fundamental than arithmetic! :D
In case this wasn't clear, the "arithmetic" in question is being performed on sets (or types). For example, for sum types, the number of inhabitants of the type is the sum of the inhabitants of the components. All three of addition, multiplication and subtyping are operations on sets (types). So this was a strange thing to say.
> Simplicity is a virtue because it lowers the cognitive load of a language. I don't know if mapping something to arithmetic tells us something actually profound about the productivity of a language feature, even if it gives me a little shiver of delight when I think about it.
My real point is this: if you are deciding to build a language, as far as I'm concerned, it is very strange to add multiplication (why don't structs count as multiplication? I would say they do), then not add addition and instead add something much more complicated than addition. It just doesn't make any sense. It's not about the "productivity" (how do we measure this?) of the feature, it's about it not making any sense to do this! You add multiplication, you add addition, that's really all there is to it. I don't know, I guess I'm just repeating myself now and you won't find it convincing, but to me it's like trying to defend Roman numerals after being shown the Arabic system.
> You must have an uncharitable view of those people if you presume that all of them are making a choice that goes against their own self-interest to be happy productive programmers.
I don't think so at all. It's not really a fair choice; people choose languages in order to build things, and it's easier to build things in languages that other people are using. The full range of options is not obvious to every programmer (does the average webdev even know about ML?), and most of the time there are more important concerns than whether your language has a nice theory behind it.
Sum types and exhaustive pattern matching aren't about expressiveness, they're tools for aiding code comprehension by increasing the locality of code that has no business being distributed into completely different classes, and decreasing the cost of making changes by heavily reducing the amount of test code that needs to be written to make sure a closed set of options is handled appropiately; in OOP languages you can get this by using interfaces but to make use of it you'd have to use huge classes with methods pertaining to every usage of this closed set.
I would never willingly pick up another language that doesn't provide me with them after experiencing the productivity gains. I really like the direction Dart is moving towards and the steps taken demonstrate there's a team behind it that cares about correctness and productivity over being just a familiar Java-like, but this is the one hard blocker for me.