Do I use this thing? http://ocsigen.org/ocsigenserver/ All the docs either don't do what I'm looking for (i.e set up a web server to serve some static files) or are broken links!

OCaml is actually what I'd prefer to use (since I had a blast with SML/NJ)

I'll check out that book, thanks! But I did just skim the ToC and it has nothing about serving HTTP. Serving HTTP is like my #1 use case for anything these days :/

https://github.com/mirage/ocaml-cohttp/blob/master/examples/...

For JSON I normally use 'Jsonm' but I've heard good things about 'Ezjsonm':

https://github.com/samoht/ezjsonm

I've not personally tried them but 'postgresql-ocaml' and 'ocaml-memcached' look plausible.

Maybe http://rgrinberg.com/blog/2014/04/04/introducing-opium/ is relevant.

Other than that, as an avid Scala fan, I've been long wondering why people favour Go so much. Arguably, if you've started out with RoR, then Node.js was a great improvement (dynamic typing with awesome speed). Then came Go, which solves many of the issues you tend to encounter with Node.js. So now, after it has reasonably matured, many people are pivoting to it. Scala, while having a rather "bloated" core library (i.e. quite exhaustive), already does most that Go does (i.e. an Actor is reasonably close to a goroutine etc.) and has an awesome type system. But then, I'm biased and YMMV ;)

[1] https://magarciaepfl.github.io/scala/

Probably true. Go has a far more simple language specification, but it's not as if Scala is particularly alien.

> If you don't have a lot of experience with Java and the JVM, Go also avoids that whole avalanche of complexity, apart from Scala itself.

Why is Java or the JVM an 'avalanche of complexity' for Scala?

There's just an enormous amount of stuff to learn, and most of it is required-but-incidental; none of it (except Scala, in our example) is an inherently necessary part of getting from learning to a production system running Scala on the JVM, but you will end up having to become conversant with many of these things, and probably dozens of similar infrastructure and tooling systems.

[1] Haha. I was thinking this was mainly between Oracle's and openjdk, because that's what seems easily available, but it looks like there are four or five currently updated JVMs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Java_virtual_mach...

> Which JDK do I use[1]?

The Oracle JDK (which is the same as OpenJDK FYI).

> What happens when one library I want to use recommends a different JDK than another library I want to use?

There is a 3-month period or so every three years when a new major Java release is done when some developers of enterprisy libraries might want to do some more testing before making a recommendation. It's not a big question in the JVM world at all, and it's definitely not a big problem even for early adopters.

> Build tools questions: ant, maven, gradle?

SBT. You're building a new Scala project.

> most of it is required-but-incidental; none of it (except Scala, in our example) is an inherently necessary part of getting from learning to a production system

You would have been right five years ago. Today, many people run Akka/Spray/Play projects in production just fine without deeper devops knowledge necessary than with other runtimes.

Ah, that's because that was the only place I've had much experience with Java and Scala. We wanted to use Elasticsearch (Java) from our CMS (Java), and the recommended way to do that (at the time: embedding ES in your application as a search-only node) turned out to be infeasible, due to ES and the CMS (which was started in 2006ish) being unwilling to share any specific JDK without a lot of code changes to the CMS. We ended up building a system involving RabbitMQ and a thousand lines of PHP, as the easiest solution. :(

So, yeah, I recognize that a lot of my bad feelings about JVM languages are not particularly relevant to green-field development, whether in Java or Scala. I just got ranty. Sorry.

It looks like that's still what's happening in the Java API: http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/client/j... I'd like to reiterate that moving our app to a more recent JDK would have also been a good solution, except that we didn't have the dev and qa resources at the time to devote to that.

It is true that Scala's compile times are long, but the tooling provides ways so that you don't have to wait so much during development.

Citation needed. Hackage goes to great lengths to validate packages as much as possible. Other support systems do continuous integration and further validation, if you're looking for well regarded package subsets.

Maintaining 6000+ open source packages is a pretty serious task.

All I want to do is serve an HTTP request.

If none of that helps, come to freenode #haskell, those packages really should work.

I ran into a bunch of bugs getting haskell platform set up correctly on OSX (wouldn't remove my old version, had to manually remove GHC, also reported this one https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/1980) but after reinstalling Haskell platform it seems to be working better. Thanks.

Edit: I don't think there's anything like type classes either but I'm not 100%.

It is strong enough for me.

I see the lack of algebraic data types and type classes as a feature, honestly. It means I can learn the things I need and start working in 2 days instead of in 2 weeks or a month.

I sometimes need generics, but not frequently enough to miss them.

You think Go's type system is weak. I think Haskell's type system is overcomplicated. So, there.

“When I work at this system up to 12hrs a day, I’m profoundly uninterested in what user interface a novice user would prefer.” —Erik Naggum

Are you using visual basic because you could pick it up in 2 days instead of taking a month to learn Go?

It's easy to learn because it doesn't do anything interesting that you're not already familiar with. If you're not missing them, you're missing out on simple beautiful abstractions like map and filter. You're also missing out on type safe libraries for containers. It's not possible to write a generic container without casts to interface{}, which is a shame imo.

Bringing The Language Which Shall not Be Named to the discussion is a low blow. But I deserve it. My phrase about overcomplication was flamebaity and uncalled for, and I apologize.

> you're missing out on simple beautiful abstractions like map and filter

The thing is, in Go, those take almost as much space as a plain for loop.

I know, you will tell me "that's because Go's too verbose". I will grant that it's more verbose than Haskell.

But I am not doing maps and filters all the time in my code.

> It's not possible to write a generic container without casts to interface{}, which is a shame imo.

My point is that generic containers are the feature where generics are genuinely needed. And in those cases interface{} makes it possible. Not super-awesome, but possible. I actually like that the language doesn't bend over to fulfill something that looks almost like an edge case. It is not "programming with mathematics". It's still "moving bits around". But the bits can be moved with ease.

1. You can write code that performs identical logic for a range of different data types, without having to know what they are.

2. That code can be checked for type safety.

interface{} gives you half of 1. You can write code that performs common logic and takes an interface{}, but then that code has to manually switch on type, or convert type before running.

Which gives you trouble with 2. Once you don't have a distinct type, you can't check for safety. All the compiler can do is check that an interface{} is passed in; which is a pretty weak guarantee. Meanwhile, in languages with generics, the you can write a generic method that uses the + operator and the compiler can check whether it works for numbers (OK), strings (OK), HTTP servers (uh oh, stop the bus!)...

One might prefer a weak type system over a strong type system, but that's a different discussion. The parent clearly expressed that he wants a static strong type system.

I disagree. "Weakly typed" does not even have a precise definition.

Defining "strongly typed" as "the way Haskell does it" and anything less as "weakly typed" is an opinion.

I agree that Haskell types are stronger than Go. That does not does not mean that Go is "weakly typed". It's "less strongly typed than Haskell".

> The parent clearly expressed that he wants a static strong type system.

I was not contesting that, only the classification of Go as "weakly typed".

In the most conventional definitions, Go is a strongly typed language. So this factual statement appears to be false.

As always, there is some confusion in this topic about dynamic typing vs static typing. There seems to be plenty of dynamic typing in Go, which in itself does not make its type system weak.

Calling one weak and the other overcomplicated are both completely subjective, biased statements.

And no, some random blog doesn't count as a citation: There are zero legitimate, agreed to sources that will back up your definition. Instead it's people painting broad strokes to bias the world towards their own beliefs.

Just as unreasonably I could say that Go has a Clarified Type System, versus the Conundrum Type System found in Haskell.

Now whether Go's type system actually has the property of 'weak'ness is very debatable. But whether it is true or false, it remains a factual statement.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_and_weak_typing

The post that set this off called Go's type system "weak". They were not saying that it was weakly typed.