alt Hacker NewsPeople tell me Lean is really good for functional programming. However, coming from Agda, it feels like a pretty clunky downgrade. They also tell me it's good for tactics, but I've found Coq's tactics more powerful and ergonomic. Maybe these are all baby-duck perceptions. So far, it feels like Lean's main strength isn't being the best at anything, but being decent at everything and having a huge community. I see the point and appeal, but it's saddens me that a bit of the beauty and power are lost in exchange.
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I prefer agda as proof checker but its not a practical choice for building software. Lean feels like it could legitimately become a successor to Haskell as the go to functional programming language for software development.
In other words, it is a network effect.
My perspective is that network effects are far less long-lasting than they feel in the moment. For example if being decent at everything and having a huge community was the only thing that mattered, Perl would still be a big deal. Many similar examples exist.
In the case of Lean, being the first with a huge library really makes a difference. Just as Perl got a big boost from having CPAN. (Which was an imitation of CTAN, except for a programming language instead of TeX.)
But, based on scaling laws, we should expect the value of a large library for most users to grow around the log of the size of the library. (See https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/teaching/courses/2009-08UVM-300/do... for the relevant scaling laws.)
When your library is small, this looks like an insurmountable barrier. But you don't have to match the scale for factors of usability to become more important. And porting mathematical libraries is a good target for LLMs. The source is verified, the target is verifiable, and the reasoning path generally ports.
The flip side of this is that, thanks to LLMs, working on a minority platform isn't the barrier that you might expect. Because if their library can be ported to your platform, then your proof can probably be ported to their platform as well!
I've used agda a tiny bit and Lean somewhat more, and I definitely found it much easier to write functional programs not focused on mathematical proofs in Lean than Agda. IIRC the difference was mostly tooling - Agda's documentation is kind of bad and it's a pain to get it working on your system (and it really wants you to be using Emacs specifically). Whereas Lean documents how to write the cat utility in its own docs and generally has a much better, more modern tooling experience.
I'm curious what you like about Agda functional programming? Many of the praises I hear about it have to do with it's dependent pattern matching, and I think Lean suffers a lot more in that regard. I'm curious though if you still find Agda friendlier for "normal" fp (and if so, how?)
Thing is, it comes after both. Maybe it is just being a jack of all trades, but something made it success when the others remain fairly niche.
fyi it's Rocq now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocq
> So far, it feels like Lean's main strength isn't being the best at anything, but being decent at everything and having a huge community. I see the point and appeal, but it's saddens me that a bit of the beauty and power are lost in exchange.
To me that feels like a community that's finally matured enough to start getting on with things. Perfect tools aren't the point; get tools that are good enough and do actual work with them.