this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
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Programming Languages
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If only it had the one thing of OCaml does that's actually important: ML modules.
Okay, I'm being kinda glib. Ocaml has plenty of other stuff going for it, and F# is a great, productive language, but its biggest weakness is something it doesn't have.
That, or Haskell's typeclasses (which serve much of the same need). Without one or the other you lose out on a lot of expressive power.
Modules are substantially more expressive than typeclasses, but yes, type classes get you a decent part of the way there.
They have different sets of tradeoffs and prioritize different things. Nevertheless, you can express typeclasses with the module system just as you can express the module system with typeclasses (using modern Haskell language extensions to the typeclass system). One is not more expressive than the other. You give me any usage of the module system, and I can show you how it can be done with typeclasses.
Hah, I was afraid you would say that when I wrote my comment. I don't mean expressive in the sense of "can encode X"; I mean expressive in the sense of "can nicely encode X". The bullshit you have to put yourself through in Haskell to get the core niceties of modules is unpalatable (to me, anyway).
You likely aren't familiar with modern Haskell, tbh. Things have changed a lot in the last handful of years. If you give me an example, I can show you how it can be done pretty reasonably (I write Haskell professionally, fwiw).