Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reflections on my first completed application in OCaml

discuss.ocaml.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 42 posts

Re: Reflections on my first completed application in OCaml

#11

Post by rbjorklin »

red2awn wrote: post #4

My biggest frustration with the Ocaml is with third-party libraries documentation. The majority of the docs are just function signatures without explanation, let alone usage examples. The language however is quite nice and the stdlib is fairly complete. Edit: Another problem I see is the (over?) reliance on PPX preprocessors. It does make a lot of tasks simpler, but it is too much magic for me personally.

I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said!

What’s making the PPX situation even worse is that they seem to break with every new release of the compiler.

Re: Reflections on my first completed application in OCaml

#12

Post by brmgb »

fbsvvc123 wrote: post #7
nikitaga wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many applications just don't need it. Those that do can of course use libraries, but many (say, backend servers) don't really need to process Unicode strings I can't speak for actual Ocaml users, but I've personally rejected Ocaml for my user-facing webapps because of things like this. Treating unicode as something optional was fine for early 2000s, but it's really not fine today. Most user facing applications need…

Actual ocaml user here. User-facing web apps just aren’t a core application target for most people who use Ocaml, and probably won’t ever be. There are many perfectly good languages out there that address that need, so if ocaml doesn’t, so be it. Maybe I’m just in the minority - I like the fact that there are lots of languages out there, some of which choose not to cater to every possible development scenario. This i…

> User-facing web apps just aren’t a core application target for most people who use Ocaml, and probably won’t ever be.

Some industrial Ocaml users use the web as a UI. I'm fairly certain Jane Street does it for exemple. That's very much user-facing web apps.

I understand that it's not something that interests you but there has been plenty of work geared towards building web applications in Ocaml (and Reason). Saying it probably won't ever be a core application target seems quite wrong.

Re: Reflections on my first completed application in OCaml

#13

Post by anentropic »

fbsvvc123 wrote: post #7
nikitaga wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many applications just don't need it. Those that do can of course use libraries, but many (say, backend servers) don't really need to process Unicode strings I can't speak for actual Ocaml users, but I've personally rejected Ocaml for my user-facing webapps because of things like this. Treating unicode as something optional was fine for early 2000s, but it's really not fine today. Most user facing applications need…

Actual ocaml user here. User-facing web apps just aren’t a core application target for most people who use Ocaml, and probably won’t ever be. There are many perfectly good languages out there that address that need, so if ocaml doesn’t, so be it. Maybe I’m just in the minority - I like the fact that there are lots of languages out there, some of which choose not to cater to every possible development scenario. This i…

> User-facing web apps just aren’t a core application target for most people who use Ocaml, and probably won’t ever be.

this is a self-fulfilling prophecy

Re: Reflections on my first completed application in OCaml

#14

Post by msh »

fbsvvc123 wrote: post #7
nikitaga wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many applications just don't need it. Those that do can of course use libraries, but many (say, backend servers) don't really need to process Unicode strings I can't speak for actual Ocaml users, but I've personally rejected Ocaml for my user-facing webapps because of things like this. Treating unicode as something optional was fine for early 2000s, but it's really not fine today. Most user facing applications need…

Actual ocaml user here. User-facing web apps just aren’t a core application target for most people who use Ocaml, and probably won’t ever be. There are many perfectly good languages out there that address that need, so if ocaml doesn’t, so be it. Maybe I’m just in the minority - I like the fact that there are lots of languages out there, some of which choose not to cater to every possible development scenario. This i…

I am not american and use a european alphabet with more characters. So if I need to handle user input or parse files with data I need unicode handling, so even for non web apps it can be needed.

Re: Reflections on my first completed application in OCaml

#15

Post by aldanor »

red2awn wrote: post #4

My biggest frustration with the Ocaml is with third-party libraries documentation. The majority of the docs are just function signatures without explanation, let alone usage examples. The language however is quite nice and the stdlib is fairly complete. Edit: Another problem I see is the (over?) reliance on PPX preprocessors. It does make a lot of tasks simpler, but it is too much magic for me personally.

It's funny that I could say the opposite about Rust if you asked what I enjoy most about the ecosystem - many third party libraries have outstanding documentation. Wonder why is that - in the end, it's just some folks like you and me spending their free time writing those. Why is it different for different languages then, is it the tooling like rustdoc and docs.rs or just the standards set by the community? Not sure.

Re: Reflections on my first completed application in OCaml

#16

Post by goatinaboat »

msh wrote: post #14
fbsvvc123 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actual ocaml user here. User-facing web apps just aren’t a core application target for most people who use Ocaml, and probably won’t ever be. There are many perfectly good languages out there that address that need, so if ocaml doesn’t, so be it. Maybe I’m just in the minority - I like the fact that there are lots of languages out there, some of which choose not to cater to every possible development scenario. This i…

I am not american and use a european alphabet with more characters. So if I need to handle user input or parse files with data I need unicode handling, so even for non web apps it can be needed.

I am not american and use a european alphabet with more characters. So if I need to handle user input or parse files with data I need unicode handling, so even for non web apps it can be needed.

And yet OCaml is French and its French authors do not feel constrained by the lack of unicode or they would have "scratched their own itch".

Re: Reflections on my first completed application in OCaml

#17

Post by chriswarbo »

fbsvvc123 wrote: post #7
nikitaga wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many applications just don't need it. Those that do can of course use libraries, but many (say, backend servers) don't really need to process Unicode strings I can't speak for actual Ocaml users, but I've personally rejected Ocaml for my user-facing webapps because of things like this. Treating unicode as something optional was fine for early 2000s, but it's really not fine today. Most user facing applications need…

Actual ocaml user here. User-facing web apps just aren’t a core application target for most people who use Ocaml, and probably won’t ever be. There are many perfectly good languages out there that address that need, so if ocaml doesn’t, so be it. Maybe I’m just in the minority - I like the fact that there are lots of languages out there, some of which choose not to cater to every possible development scenario. This i…

The ML family is really good at (safe!) string processing, e.g. the meme that they're only good for writing compilers.

Lots of Web stuff is just that (DB queries, GET/POST parameters, HTML, templating, URLs, JSON, XML, etc.). Whilst lots of that can be done via bytes, there are certainly cases where Unicode is needed (e.g. finding word boundaries, case-insensitive comparison, etc.).

Ocaml (and SML) have the enviable position of being safer+faster than scripting languages, and more approachable+familiar than the likes of Haskell (which otherwise has a similar feature set). That makes it very well suited to such domains IMHO.

Re: Reflections on my first completed application in OCaml

#18

Post by johnnycerberus »

chriswarbo wrote: post #17
fbsvvc123 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actual ocaml user here. User-facing web apps just aren’t a core application target for most people who use Ocaml, and probably won’t ever be. There are many perfectly good languages out there that address that need, so if ocaml doesn’t, so be it. Maybe I’m just in the minority - I like the fact that there are lots of languages out there, some of which choose not to cater to every possible development scenario. This i…

The ML family is really good at (safe!) string processing, e.g. the meme that they're only good for writing compilers. Lots of Web stuff is just that (DB queries, GET/POST parameters, HTML, templating, URLs, JSON, XML, etc.). Whilst lots of that can be done via bytes, there are certainly cases where Unicode is needed (e.g. finding word boundaries, case-insensitive comparison, etc.). Ocaml (and SML) have the enviable…

^ This. Exactly my experience with it. Though, recently I'm using Java when I work with others on cloud-related projects and Scala (which is a ML+typeclasses+concurrency on the JVM) to write a compiler for OpenCL. For me, OCaml is great if you want compilation speed, fast iterations. Lacks in other departments: concurrency, parallelism, ergonomics, availability of libraries (outside compiler territory). Also, there's Flix that can have a lot of potential in the future, which is on JVM also: https://flix.dev/

Re: Reflections on my first completed application in OCaml

#19

Post by johnnycerberus »

davidbrennerjr wrote: post #8
fbsvvc123 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actual ocaml user here. User-facing web apps just aren’t a core application target for most people who use Ocaml, and probably won’t ever be. There are many perfectly good languages out there that address that need, so if ocaml doesn’t, so be it. Maybe I’m just in the minority - I like the fact that there are lots of languages out there, some of which choose not to cater to every possible development scenario. This i…

are there any advantages to using OCaml for making web apps?

If you are interested in web apps, you should pick a platform first:

* Node with TypeScript

* JVM with Scala

* CLR with F#

Re: Reflections on my first completed application in OCaml

#20

Post by nestorD »

aldanor wrote: post #15
red2awn wrote: post #4

My biggest frustration with the Ocaml is with third-party libraries documentation. The majority of the docs are just function signatures without explanation, let alone usage examples. The language however is quite nice and the stdlib is fairly complete. Edit: Another problem I see is the (over?) reliance on PPX preprocessors. It does make a lot of tasks simpler, but it is too much magic for me personally.

It's funny that I could say the opposite about Rust if you asked what I enjoy most about the ecosystem - many third party libraries have outstanding documentation. Wonder why is that - in the end, it's just some folks like you and me spending their free time writing those. Why is it different for different languages then, is it the tooling like rustdoc and docs.rs or just the standards set by the community? Not sure.

I can't speak for others but for me it is the tooling. Knowing that I can get great online doc with a single command is a very good motivation to start writing said documentation.
Post reply on HN