That's awesome. Though, it doesn't seem to think Hampstead Heath has any trees. Nor Croydon, not even Thornton Heath. The Wilderness in Richmond Park seems to be a missing spot, as are some of the plantations (maybe Isabella Plantation, my map fu is failing me). Maybe the royal parks keep their own records?
STM isn't really used in Go like it is in Haskell.
Here's the example from a Go STM package that's based on Haskell STM. It has gotchas that you won't encounter in Haskell though, due to the nature of these languages.
XSLT's matching rules allow a 'push' style of transform that's really neat. But you can actually do that with any programming language such as Javascript.
I used to use XSLT a lot, though it was a while ago.
You can use Javascript to get the same effect and, indeed, write your transforms in much the same style as XSLT. Javascript has xpath (still). You have a choice of template language but JSX is common and convenient. A function for applying XSLT-style matching rules for an XSLT push style of transform is only a few lines of code.
Do you have a particular example where you think Javascript might be more verbose than XSLT?
One way to get some intuition with FCIS is to write some Haskell.
Because Haskell programs pretty much have to be FCIS or they won't compile.
How it plays out is...
1. A Haskell program executes side effects (known as `IO` in Haskell). The type of the `main` program is `IO ()`, meaning it does some IO and doesn't return a value - a program is not a function
2. A Haskell program (code with type `IO`) can call functions. But since functions are pure in Haskell, they can't call code in `IO`.
3. This doesn't actually restrict what you can do but it does influence how you write your code. There are a variety of patterns that weren't well understood until the 1990s or later that enable it. For example, a pure Haskell function can calculate an effectful program to execute. Or it can map a pure function in a side-effecting context. Or it can pipe pure values to a side-effecting stream.
Surely transactions are a pretty good example of where functional core / imperative shell is a good guide. You really don't want to be doing arbitrary side effects inside your transaction because those can't be backed out. Check out STM in Haskell for a good example.
> Indeed, the general idea of imperative assembly comes to mind as the ultimate "core" for most software.
That's not what functional core, imperative shell means though. It's a given that CPUs aren't functional. The advice is for people programming in languages that have expressions - ruby, in the case of the original talk. The functional paradigm mostly assumes automatic memory management.
On strings in Ada vs Rust. Ada's design predates Unicode (early 1980s vs 1991), so Ada String is basically char array whereas Rust string is a Unicode text type. This explains why you can index into Ada Strings, which are arrays of bytes, but not into Rust strings, which are UTF8 encoded buffers that should be treated as text. Likely the Rust implementation could have used a byte array here.
It's disappointing that your terraform experience with Typescript or python is better than your experience with HCL. HCL should really be better than it is.
Any of the modern configuration languages would be better. They're all very sensitive to the problems of side effects and environment-specific behaviour - it's a defining characteristic. For example, pkl.
Terraform is good overall but HCL just isn't a very good language.
Given that its main purpose is to describe objects of various types, its facilities for describing types are pretty weak and its facilities for describing data are oddly inconsistent. Its features for loops and conditionals are weak and ad-hoc compared with a regular programming language. Identifier scope / imports are a disaster and defining a function is woeful.
Some of this is influenced by Terraform's problem domain but most of it isn't required by that (if it was required, people wouldn't have such an easy time doing their Terraform in python/go/rust).
Despite this, Terraform is overall good. But there's a reason there's a small industry of alternatives to HCL.