51–60 of 88 posts
ML really is a beautiful and under-appreciated family of languages. Haskell is a bit too supernatural for my taste, but ML and its derivatives hit the sweet spot between powerful type systems and natural syntax. As a Kotlin developer, I find reading OCaml code a breeze and the compiler is refreshingly snappy (much faster than Gradle). I just wish it had better developer tools.
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The syntax is not great, the standard library is very sparse, and the error messages from the compiler and interpreter are terrible (and used to be worse). The OCaml team used to treat the native code compiler (ocamlopt) as a second-class citizen, but it's the implementation that matters for performance. Since the end of Dennard scaling about 15 years ago, OCaml's lack of multithreading has also been a pain point, on…
Why do you think that the native compiler was treated as a second class citizen? This is quite strange take from my point of view. For instance OCaml native compiler was available on the M1 Macs two months after the M1 release. Similarly, all major CPU architectures (x86, ARM, PowerPC, RISC-V, s390x) have been supported for years.
It's true that that is no longer the attitude. But if we want to understand why one language is more popular than another, we usually need to look at things that happened in the past, not just things that are happening right now. Even C's meteoric rise took 15 years from the first C compilers until it was the undisputed queen of programming languages, partly as a result of missteps made by the communities of ALGOL-68, ALGOL-W, Lisp, PL/I, SNOBOL, TRAC, FORTRAN, BCPL, and, perhaps most interestingly, MULTICS, 20 years earlier.
(It's also possible that my memory that the OCaml team treated the native-code compiler as a second-class citizen is incorrect, either because I misremember what they were saying or because I misinterpreted it.)
ML really is a beautiful and under-appreciated family of languages. Haskell is a bit too supernatural for my taste, but ML and its derivatives hit the sweet spot between powerful type systems and natural syntax. As a Kotlin developer, I find reading OCaml code a breeze and the compiler is refreshingly snappy (much faster than Gradle). I just wish it had better developer tools.
The only thing missing from F# is an Elixir/Erlang/OTP-like process system (`MailboxProcessor` is pretty good though), but then again, every language except Elixir/Erlang/OTP is missing that.
I tried OCaml a long time ago, and one of the things that really turned me off of it was all the inscrutable error messages. I went to #ocaml on Freenode for help, and when I had the error messages explained to me I asked how the person who explained them knew what they meant. He told me that the reason he knew was because he took a couple of semesters of type theory courses at his university. I didn't want to have t…
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I wonder why this is the case. Ocaml syntax doesn't seem very arcane, it is not hell-bent on functional purism and pragmatically allows for imperative code. Performance seems quite reasonable. What does it lack that prevented it from gaining wider acceptance? Surely buy-in from a large company was an issue, but even F# hasn't seen any significant uptake. Is it really the lack of curly brackets? That didn't stop Pytho…
The syntax is not great, the standard library is very sparse, and the error messages from the compiler and interpreter are terrible (and used to be worse). The OCaml team used to treat the native code compiler (ocamlopt) as a second-class citizen, but it's the implementation that matters for performance. Since the end of Dennard scaling about 15 years ago, OCaml's lack of multithreading has also been a pain point, on…
The reasons in that case are that .NET was not originally cross-platform, which was a major blunder for Microsoft, C#, and especially F#. The other is that people have some weird stigma against Microsoft, despite it not applying in many cases. Although they should have started off cross-platform, the transition from .NET Framework, to .NET Core, and now to .NET 5/6/7 has been really impressive. That along with GitHub and Visual Studio Code, it's pretty amazing how much progress Microsoft has made for developers.
I just wish it would bring more people to F#, as it's sort of a Goldilocks language since it hits so many sweet spots.
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That was mostly a man-power issue. The good news is that nowadays such nonsensical error messages are near the top of my personal development priority for OCaml.
During those 25 years OCaml gained native-code compilers for new architectures, labeled arguments, and polymorphic variants, among other things. How could it be mostly a manpower issue?
Could someone please explain ? : type 'a list = 'a :: 'a list | [] The article says "::" is a Data Constructor. I can make sense of type 'a = Left of 'a | Right of 'a where Right and Left are the Data constructors but I don't see the link with the part I don't understand.
So this type definition means that `'a list` is a list of elements of type `'a`, and it's defined by being something of type `'a` consed onto either another list of type `'a` OR the empty list, represented by `[]`.
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Why do you think that the native compiler was treated as a second class citizen? This is quite strange take from my point of view. For instance OCaml native compiler was available on the M1 Macs two months after the M1 release. Similarly, all major CPU architectures (x86, ARM, PowerPC, RISC-V, s390x) have been supported for years.
20 and 25 years ago, the attitude (as I remember it) was that the native-code compiler was not very important because the bytecode interpreter was fast enough for most uses. It's true that that is no longer the attitude. But if we want to understand why one language is more popular than another, we usually need to look at things that happened in the past, not just things that are happening right now. Even C's meteori…
ML really is a beautiful and under-appreciated family of languages. Haskell is a bit too supernatural for my taste, but ML and its derivatives hit the sweet spot between powerful type systems and natural syntax. As a Kotlin developer, I find reading OCaml code a breeze and the compiler is refreshingly snappy (much faster than Gradle). I just wish it had better developer tools.
I like Rust for syntax, tooling, and ML ideas but I wish there was a "Rust-lite" that was garbage collected.
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I like Rust for syntax, tooling, and ML ideas but I wish there was a "Rust-lite" that was garbage collected.
It's got its warts, but Ocaml (and ReasonML if you want a more familiar syntax) are right in that sweet spot for me.
I'm really hoping it breaks into the mainstream such that it gets the investment that other mainstream languages get (hopefully said investment will smooth out these rough edges).