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Can you elaborate for us newer OCaml users? My first reaction to this critique/point is the author must want mli, right?
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My thoughts on OCaml
111–120 of 230 posts
Re: My thoughts on OCaml
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
F# is such a great language. The fact Microsoft seems to pretend it doesn't exist is bewildering. Surely the .Net ecosystem can have two languages being promoted.
> F# is such a great language. I very much feel this, I found it productive, but it feels like a complete ghost town. I'm considering swapping to Go over using .NET for tooling/scripting.
Really? Were you active in the slack/discord channels?
Re: My thoughts on OCaml
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me it seems he gave it a lot of chance in order to find this many problems. It does sound to me like you stopped reading after the first point. Maybe you didn't give the post a chance?
To be honest, anyone who used Ocaml understands immediately that the author gave it no chance and went looking for problems. It’s obvious because the post lingers a lot about things which are not actually issues like type conversion but don’t talk about the very real issues Ocaml has (opam is not great, dune is weird).
Why are these things not issues? I think it's totally valid for someone who doesn't understand OCaml to raise issues of usability or documentation. It's not just the issues of experts that are a concern. And it's very demoralizing to get a "you're holding it wrong" response to a complaint.
Re: My thoughts on OCaml
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely ignorant here: - I really want to do a project in an almost "pure" functional language. I tried with Elixir and Phoenix, and while they are certainly great, and I wouldn't mind using it again, Elixir, and subsequently Erlang didn't feel like FP a lot of times, it felt like the warty Elixir/Erlang way to do FP, so it didn't scratch that itch for me (but again, still a great experience overall) - is there a…
Today you can install the .NET runtime, as well as the .NET development tools, on both Windows and Linux. They handle F# as well as C# out of the box. You can `dotnet publish MyApp.fsproj` on either Windows or Linux, copy the resulting `publish/` folder to another machine with a different OS, and use `dotnet MyApp.dll` to run it. There are also ways to create containers, though I have never tried them for lack of an…
+ macOS
Re: My thoughts on OCaml
#115I used OCaml as my daily driver in grad school and my postdoc, and recommend my students use it. I think the main benefits of OCaml are: Functional Has mutable references Not lazy Haskell's type system is just better. But for large, complex systems that require performant code, it can be quite difficult to track the laziness, and sometimes life is just easier if I can use a mutable references. The author is completel…
Starting with F# on Mac is worlds away from what it was in the past, I bet you could be up and running in 5 minutes: brew install dotnet-sdk dotnet new console -lang F# (in your project directory) Start VS Code in that directory, install ionide via extensions, write code… dotnet run
Exactly. And you can even pick between 3 IDEs
- JetBrains Rider (best IMHO)
- Visual Studio for Mac
- VS Code with Ionide
Re: My thoughts on OCaml
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest, anyone who used Ocaml understands immediately that the author gave it no chance and went looking for problems. It’s obvious because the post lingers a lot about things which are not actually issues like type conversion but don’t talk about the very real issues Ocaml has (opam is not great, dune is weird).
Why are these things not issues? I think it's totally valid for someone who doesn't understand OCaml to raise issues of usability or documentation. It's not just the issues of experts that are a concern. And it's very demoralizing to get a "you're holding it wrong" response to a complaint.
Because they are not issues on a day to day basis when you use the language.
I used Ocaml for a paid internship some years ago. I was very much a beginner. Do you know how many time I felt at loss or annoyed by type conversion or the precedence rules for various part of the syntax? I never did.
The truth is you never encounter the precedence rules when writing Ocaml normally using parentheses like a normal human being and you don’t convert that much between exotic types. Most of the conversion you actually do are between the same types and most of the time you have to write converter anyway because there is logic involved. I worked professionally as a Java developer for a bit. I think I had to write more conversion code between weird classes then than I ever did in Ocaml.
The issue is not telling people they are "holding it wrong". The issue is that this is not what’s going to annoy you as an Ocaml beginner.
The author of this article is not even an Ocaml beginner by the way. That’s actually someone who used to work on the Haskell compiler.
Re: My thoughts on OCaml
#117I think you should give F# a shot instead. 1. No standard and easy way of implementing interfaces No problem in F#, you have interfaces, abstract classed, ... 2. Bad standard library In F# you have access to the full .NET standard library and ecosystem. There are also quite a lot of libraries that are especially designed to take advantage of F# (SQL libs for example). 3. Syntax problems 3.1 OCaml doesn’t have a singl…
I really wish to like F# but the line noise kills me every time. I would kill for a "visual basic" f# where the absurd terseness is replaced with a little less noise. E.g. instead of seq use sequence, instead of abstract one letter symbols use words.
what noise?
I get your example of ‘seq { 1; 2; 3; }’ but list, array are not even shortened.
Re: My thoughts on OCaml
#118Almost all modern statically typed languages have closures, higher-order functions/methods, lazy streams, and combinators that run efficiently. Persistent/immutable data structures can be implemented even in C.
Also, OCaml has no tracking of side-effects (like in Haskell), and the language and the standard library have lots of features and functions with mutation, such as the array update syntax, mutable record fields, Hashtbl, and the regex module.
The only thing that makes OCaml more “functional” than e.g. Dart, Java, or Rust is that it supports tail calls. While having tail calls is important for functional programming, I would happily give up on tail calls if that means not having the problems listed above.
When you mix imperative and functional styles tail calls become less important. For example, I don’t have to implement a stream map function in Dart with a tail call to map the rest of the stream, I can just use a while or for loop.
In my opinion there is no reason to use OCaml in a new project in 2023.
Re: My thoughts on OCaml
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay...so you have to add a third party library to print? Yes, recursive data structures are a pain in Rust (well, recursive multi-owner data structures). But that's like comparing changing your oil to opening your car door. We do one of these a lot more. And bear in mind, I had to find this answer by googling and reading a random forum post. That's some pretty poor documentation. And that's not talking about aesthet…
Not really third-party; ocaml-ppx is something similar to `javax` in the Java space? But it is optional and doesn't come bundled with OCaml. Recursive structures are only rare in Rust _because_ they suck to write and have terrible performance characteristics in the language. In languages like Haskell, OCaml and Scala using tagless initial encodings for eDSL's [2] are really, really common. I don't write Rust like I w…
A lot of these things that you mentioned are valid flaws in Rust. I'm not going to dismiss them as not important or non-problems because they are genuine issues. Compile times suck. We could use hot reloading and a REPL. Debugging macros, instrumentation and perf stuff is good, but I assume it could be better. That's what I expect from a language community. Not constant denial about the state of usability. And it really does feel like many of the smaller language communities fall into this hive-mind where type signatures are valid documentation and who needs to use an editor other than emacs?
Re: My thoughts on OCaml
#120Simply put, OCaml is very principled. There is a good reason for pretty much every design decision.
The only thing one could argue is the lack of type classes, i.e., overloading. (Calling it "interfaces" is somewhat wrong.)