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Draft of OCaml Scientific Computing book

discuss.ocaml.org

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Re: Draft of OCaml Scientific Computing book

#41

Post by Ixiaus »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #10

I've never encountered a real OCaml project or anyone who uses it in my career (same is true for Haskell). I have assumed these languages are a hobby for CS academics and get used for pet projects by their devotees. Not that that's bad - they're interesting and the ideas are cool. I would just be afraid of locking myself into an isolated ecosystem that it's hard to hire experienced people for. Is anyone on HN actuall…

Haskell and OCaml are definitely not just hobbies. I've used Haskell full-time for the last five years of my career.

The company I work for uses Haskell for a network packet parsing engine, web api servers, CLI executables, build infrastructure (alongside Nix and NixOS), an interpreter for a custom programming language, a gateway/proxy service for AWS services, etc.

Re: Draft of OCaml Scientific Computing book

#42

Post by steev »

G4BB3R wrote: post #7

Each year I think wether should I learn OCaml or not. What is the current state of multi-thread OCaml? Is that a game changer or just a cool feature? I can't understand why OCaml doesn't have mass adoption.

> I can't understand why OCaml doesn't have mass adoption.

Probably for the exact same reason each year you think about learning OCaml you decide not to (I mean this sincerely, not trying to be snide).

I think the main reasons it doesn't see mass adoption in industry:

* There are only two major companies that do a substantial amount of OCaml that I can think of off the top of my head, Jane Street and Ahrefs. Facebook does some OCaml too but I don't think it's a core part of their stack.

* The tooling is lacking.

* People have an easier time learning Python or Java so you'll have a larger pool of candidates if you use one of those languages.

Re: Draft of OCaml Scientific Computing book

#43

Post by [deleted] »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #10

I've never encountered a real OCaml project or anyone who uses it in my career (same is true for Haskell). I have assumed these languages are a hobby for CS academics and get used for pet projects by their devotees. Not that that's bad - they're interesting and the ideas are cool. I would just be afraid of locking myself into an isolated ecosystem that it's hard to hire experienced people for. Is anyone on HN actuall…

[deleted]

Re: Draft of OCaml Scientific Computing book

#44

Post by brmgb »

chalst wrote: post #24
TallGuyShort wrote: post #10

I've never encountered a real OCaml project or anyone who uses it in my career (same is true for Haskell). I have assumed these languages are a hobby for CS academics and get used for pet projects by their devotees. Not that that's bad - they're interesting and the ideas are cool. I would just be afraid of locking myself into an isolated ecosystem that it's hard to hire experienced people for. Is anyone on HN actuall…

OCaml is the strongly-typed functional language that sees most serious use. It's harder to do generic polymorphism in OCaml since the language has nothing like C++'s parametric templates or Haskell's type classes. It does have a very nice module system that has the required flexibility, but compared to these languages, I think it is clunky for the kind of genericity seen in scientific computing. I think Julia has sho…

> It's harder to do generic polymorphism in OCaml since the language has nothing like C++'s parametric templates or Haskell's type classes. It does have a very nice module system that has the required flexibility, but compared to these languages, I think it is clunky for the kind of genericity seen in scientific computing.

Are parametrized modules really clunkier than parametric templates ?

Re: Draft of OCaml Scientific Computing book

#46

Post by vmchale »

steev wrote: post #42
G4BB3R wrote: post #7

Each year I think wether should I learn OCaml or not. What is the current state of multi-thread OCaml? Is that a game changer or just a cool feature? I can't understand why OCaml doesn't have mass adoption.

> I can't understand why OCaml doesn't have mass adoption. Probably for the exact same reason each year you think about learning OCaml you decide not to (I mean this sincerely, not trying to be snide). I think the main reasons it doesn't see mass adoption in industry: * There are only two major companies that do a substantial amount of OCaml that I can think of off the top of my head, Jane Street and Ahrefs. Facebook…

> Facebook does some OCaml too

Using an ML or a Lisp for language tooling is the way to go. Nothing else in that league.

Re: Draft of OCaml Scientific Computing book

#47

Post by vmchale »

doteka wrote: post #9
G4BB3R wrote: post #7

Each year I think wether should I learn OCaml or not. What is the current state of multi-thread OCaml? Is that a game changer or just a cool feature? I can't understand why OCaml doesn't have mass adoption.

I think Rust kind of stole OCaml’s thunder. It has most of the same benefits, with a mostly familiar syntax and a lot of industry buy-in. And with recent versions, I never find myself fighting the borrow checker like I used to.

Really? Just made me more reluctant to use a language without sum types :p

Re: Draft of OCaml Scientific Computing book

#48

Post by ziotom78 »

chalst wrote: post #24
TallGuyShort wrote: post #10

I've never encountered a real OCaml project or anyone who uses it in my career (same is true for Haskell). I have assumed these languages are a hobby for CS academics and get used for pet projects by their devotees. Not that that's bad - they're interesting and the ideas are cool. I would just be afraid of locking myself into an isolated ecosystem that it's hard to hire experienced people for. Is anyone on HN actuall…

OCaml is the strongly-typed functional language that sees most serious use. It's harder to do generic polymorphism in OCaml since the language has nothing like C++'s parametric templates or Haskell's type classes. It does have a very nice module system that has the required flexibility, but compared to these languages, I think it is clunky for the kind of genericity seen in scientific computing. I think Julia has sho…

> I think Julia has shown us that strong typing is not really needed for scientific computing.

I think you meant static typing, in opposition to dynamic. Julia is strongly typed like OCaml.

Re: Draft of OCaml Scientific Computing book

#49

Post by steev »

brmgb wrote: post #44
chalst wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OCaml is the strongly-typed functional language that sees most serious use. It's harder to do generic polymorphism in OCaml since the language has nothing like C++'s parametric templates or Haskell's type classes. It does have a very nice module system that has the required flexibility, but compared to these languages, I think it is clunky for the kind of genericity seen in scientific computing. I think Julia has sho…

> It's harder to do generic polymorphism in OCaml since the language has nothing like C++'s parametric templates or Haskell's type classes. It does have a very nice module system that has the required flexibility, but compared to these languages, I think it is clunky for the kind of genericity seen in scientific computing. Are parametrized modules really clunkier than parametric templates ?

At least for beginners, they absolutely are. I have found undergrads generally get the idea behind something like HashMap but getting them to reason about OCaml modules takes quite a bit of effort.

Re: Draft of OCaml Scientific Computing book

#50

Post by agumonkey »

steev wrote: post #42
G4BB3R wrote: post #7

Each year I think wether should I learn OCaml or not. What is the current state of multi-thread OCaml? Is that a game changer or just a cool feature? I can't understand why OCaml doesn't have mass adoption.

> I can't understand why OCaml doesn't have mass adoption. Probably for the exact same reason each year you think about learning OCaml you decide not to (I mean this sincerely, not trying to be snide). I think the main reasons it doesn't see mass adoption in industry: * There are only two major companies that do a substantial amount of OCaml that I can think of off the top of my head, Jane Street and Ahrefs. Facebook…

ocaml reasonml seems quite on the forefront .. it's not the core but it's something public
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