51–60 of 132 posts
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…
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I am part of Owl contributors/maintainers. You are right that the ecosystem is small, and will likely be always behind Python, R and Julia. But considering how small the community around numerical methods in OCaml is, I think the work that went into owl and this book is incredible and may help raising awareness and growing the userbase. I think one of our current limitations is the lack of a high quality, full-featur…
> You are right that the ecosystem is small, and will likely be always behind Python, R and Julia. But you should be able to call those languages from OCaml. For instance, RInside https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RInside/index.html lets you call R from any language with a C FFI. A very simple solution (even if not quite as convenient as a full OCaml solution) that lets someone write OCaml if that's their prefe…
I'm beginning to think of learning either OCaml or F# for data sciency-kind of things. Any points of comparison between those? Library ecosystem seems better on F#, but I must admit I'm somewhat wary of the behemoth that is .NET . What else should I consider?
Scala might be something worth looking at. There's a lot of libraries on the JVM, but sparse linear algebra is still kind of a wasteland compared to Python or Numpy. I wish someone would just make some good bindings to Eigen or something for the JVM.
I'm beginning to think of learning either OCaml or F# for data sciency-kind of things. Any points of comparison between those? Library ecosystem seems better on F#, but I must admit I'm somewhat wary of the behemoth that is .NET . What else should I consider?
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-f-5-preview...
I had originally been learning ocaml but switched to f# because it has much better tooling and more uses (e.g. better web server support since I use .net libs)
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> 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.
I'm beginning to think of learning either OCaml or F# for data sciency-kind of things. Any points of comparison between those? Library ecosystem seems better on F#, but I must admit I'm somewhat wary of the behemoth that is .NET . What else should I consider?
Data science and interactive programming are actually the main focus of the next release of f#. Not saying it’s bad now, but Microsoft wants it to be a strong option in data workflows. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-f-5-preview... I had originally been learning ocaml but switched to f# because it has much better tooling and more uses (e.g. better web server support since I use .net libs)
From just preliminary research, F# seems both loved by its devs, but also found to be a bit of an unloved child on a sidetrack - that was probably another reason I hesitated in getting started. Do you think that is justified?
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I've talked to at least one persons who works on production Haskell applications, and Jane Street, a company that was discussed on HN just yesterday makes heavy use of OCaml, but yeah they're pretty rare and I suppose the people working with them are just lucky. I've heard particularly about the Haskell market that if you want a chance of competing for the few jobs available you have to be among the top-haskellers, b…
Jane Street being the only company that anyone ever mentions when discussing OCaml is even worse in my opinion. It means the ecosystem is going to be heavily driven by their needs, not to mention that banks tend to have idiosyncratic development cultures.
Skimming through this book, one thing i was constantly wondering, is how well does this ocaml framework use the hardware. Leaving ocaml aside, the connection between scientific computing and hardware is the one thing I miss the most in "scientific computing" books and courses, because it sooner or later limits the science that any researcher doing scientific computing can do. To give an example, earlier this week, on…
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I've talked to at least one persons who works on production Haskell applications, and Jane Street, a company that was discussed on HN just yesterday makes heavy use of OCaml, but yeah they're pretty rare and I suppose the people working with them are just lucky. I've heard particularly about the Haskell market that if you want a chance of competing for the few jobs available you have to be among the top-haskellers, b…
Jane Street being the only company that anyone ever mentions when discussing OCaml is even worse in my opinion. It means the ecosystem is going to be heavily driven by their needs, not to mention that banks tend to have idiosyncratic development cultures.
I'm beginning to think of learning either OCaml or F# for data sciency-kind of things. Any points of comparison between those? Library ecosystem seems better on F#, but I must admit I'm somewhat wary of the behemoth that is .NET . What else should I consider?
I have spent a couple of years doing .NET for life sciences, as many labs are mostly focused on Windows due to their laboratory robots and data readers.
So many researchers end up using a mix of Excel, VBA and MFC (old tech) and Forms/WPF (new tech) based tooling.
If that is your data science domain, I would definitely advise F#.