The design of OCaml/Reason is the sweet spot of functional programming for me but every time I must deal with Dune after working with the tooling of Go or Rust I want to stab myself in the face repeatedly and I think that maybe that might just be related to the general concept of "masses" + OCaml.
Real World OCaml – 2nd Edition (2021)
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Re: Real World OCaml – 2nd Edition (2021)
#22cool! always happy to see more of this.
i learned out of the unpublished french ora book "developing applications with ocaml". (incidentally it was so useful i had a copy shop bind me a custom "book")
Re: Real World OCaml – 2nd Edition (2021)
#23cool! always happy to see more of this. i learned out of the unpublished french ora book "developing applications with ocaml". (incidentally it was so useful i had a copy shop bind me a custom "book")
I love that book! I have happy memories of poring over it until I understood signatures and functors.
It's available free online as well: https://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/html/index.html
Re: Real World OCaml – 2nd Edition (2021)
#24An easier introductory book: https://ocaml-book.com/
It was published in 2013, though. Much has changed in terms of tooling, right?
Re: Real World OCaml – 2nd Edition (2021)
#25I'm a bit surprised to see this making it to the front page. It's been available for a long time and is one of the first resources anyone with an interest in OCaml is likely to encounter. It seems a little like posting a link to cppreference.com.
A more generous interpretation of your sentiment could be:
This is a fantastic resource that anyone with a passing interest in the OCaml programming language needs to be aware of.
Re: Real World OCaml – 2nd Edition (2021)
#26Neat! I didn't know there was a 2nd edition. Does anyone know how it differs from the 1st edition?
Re: Real World OCaml – 2nd Edition (2021)
#27I'm a bit surprised to see this making it to the front page. It's been available for a long time and is one of the first resources anyone with an interest in OCaml is likely to encounter. It seems a little like posting a link to cppreference.com.
There are constantly new programmers joining the community here. It’s good for quality things to appear regularly.
Re: Real World OCaml – 2nd Edition (2021)
#28Totally unrelated to the link/book, but sparked a question that I've had for a while (curious to hear any answers) --> when you take an initial look at a programming language that you're completely unfamiliar with, and you glance through the syntax of all the basic constructs, do you ever have a particularly strong reaction (be it negative or positive), and if so have you tried to identify why that might be the case?
Re: Real World OCaml – 2nd Edition (2021)
#29The design of OCaml/Reason is the sweet spot of functional programming for me but every time I must deal with Dune after working with the tooling of Go or Rust I want to stab myself in the face repeatedly and I think that maybe that might just be related to the general concept of "masses" + OCaml.
Sorry could you explain your comment some more? Genuinely curious what is bad about dune. Just started using it
Re: Real World OCaml – 2nd Edition (2021)
#30I'm sure this book is an excellent resource (upon skimming the online version, it looks very thorough and well thought out). I think there is some confusion about who "the masses" are though. I don't think a subchapter titled "POLYMORPHIC VARIANT SUBTYPING" is necessarily for—what I consider—"the masses."
I don't necessarily begrudge the authors for including chapters on advanced topics, it's not like people have to read the whole book. But you raise a valid point. For languages like OCaml that are both large and also veer into PL research territory, some guidance about how many of the advanced topics one needs to understand to be a "real world" programmer could be a big help to the language's adoption.
Yeah that’s a great point. I’ve been writing front-end with reasonml (an ocaml syntax) for a couple years now and I’ve gotten a lot of benefit without writing functors at all.