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OCaml as my primary language

xvw.lol

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Re: OCaml as my primary language

#21

Post by wiseowise »

ackfoobar wrote: post #18
wiseowise wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Slightly more verbose sum type declaration is worth it *when it makes using the cases cleaner.* Correct. This is not the case when you talk about Java/Kotlin. Just ugliness and typical boilerplate heavy approach of JVM languages.

> Just ugliness and typical boilerplate heavy approach of JVM languages. I have provided a case how using inheritance to express sum types can help in the use site. You attacked without substantiating your claim.

Kotlin's/Java's implementation is just a poor man's implementation of very restricted set of real sum types. I have no idea what

> This has the benefit of giving you the ability to refer to a case as its own type.

means.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#22

Post by debugnik »

Smaug123 wrote: post #19
nukifw wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! Thank you for your interest (and for potentially reading this). Yes, F# is a very nice language, however, it seems to me that I am making a somewhat forced comparison between OCaml and F# in the following section: https://xvw.lol/en/articles/why-ocaml.html#ocaml-and-f

You can hack up GADTs in F# - for example, https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Incremental/blob/9b8181... (which uses https://github.com/G-Research/TypeEquality ). (The other missing features I agree are missing.)

I've used equality witnesses in F# before, they kinda work but can't match proper GADTs. First you'll need identity conversion methods on the witness, because patterns can't introduce type equalities, then you'll realise you can't refute unreachable branches for the same reason, so you still need to use exceptions.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#23

Post by loxs »

I migrated from OCaml to Rust around 2020, haven't looked back. Although Rust is quite a lot less elegant and has some unpleasant deficiencies (lambdas, closures, currying)... and I end up having to close one one eye sometimes and clone some large data-structure to make my life easier... But regardless, its huge ecosystem and great tooling allows me to build things comparatively so easily, that OCaml has no chance. As a bonus, the end result is seriously faster - I know because I rewrote one of my projects and for some time I had feature parity between the OCaml and Rust versions.

Nevertheless, I have fond memories of OCaml and a great amount of respect for the language design. Haven't checked on it since, probably should. I hope part of the problems have been solved.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#24

Post by ackfoobar »

wiseowise wrote: post #21
ackfoobar wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just ugliness and typical boilerplate heavy approach of JVM languages. I have provided a case how using inheritance to express sum types can help in the use site. You attacked without substantiating your claim.

Kotlin's/Java's implementation is just a poor man's implementation of very restricted set of real sum types. I have no idea what > This has the benefit of giving you the ability to refer to a case as its own type. means.

> I have no idea

I can tell.

Thankfully the OCaml textbook has this explicitly called out.

https://dev.realworldocaml.org/variants.html#combining-recor...

> The main downside is the obvious one, which is that an inline record can’t be treated as its own free-standing object. And, as you can see below, OCaml will reject code that tries to do so.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#26

Post by Milpotel »

johnisgood wrote: post #14
raphinou wrote: post #9

Some years ago I also wanted to make ocaml my primary language, but rapidly encountered problems: difficulty to install (on Linux due to the requirement of a very unusual tool which name and function I forgot), no response from community regarding how to solve that problem, no solid postgresql driver, .... Wanting to use a functional language I pivoted to fsharp, which was not the expected choice for me as I use Linu…

> difficulty to install Use opam: https://opam.ocaml.org or https://opam.ocaml.org/doc/Install.html . Additionally, see: https://ocaml.org/install#linux_mac_bsd and https://ocaml.org/docs/set-up-editor . It is easy to set up with Emacs, for example. VSCodium has OCaml extension as well. All you need for the OCaml compiler is opam, it handles all the packages and the compiler. For your project, use dune: https://dune.…

"use opam" is always the answer but in reality its the worst package manager ever. I've never seen so many packages fail to install, so many broken dependencies and miscompilations that resulted in segfaults due to wrong dependencies. I just gave up with Ocaml due to the crappy ecosystem, although I could have lived with the other idiosyncrasies.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#27

Post by debugnik »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #4

OCaml is a great language without great tooling. Desperately needs a good LSP implementation to run breakpoints and other debugging tools on VSCode or other LSP-aware IDEs. I know there ARE tools available but there isn't great support for them and they don't work well

LSP isn't the protocol that interfaces with debuggers, that'd be DAP. You're right that OCaml debugging is kinda clunky at the moment.

OCaml does have an okay LSP implementation though, and it's getting better; certainly more stable than F#'s in my experience, since that comparison is coming up a lot in this comment section.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#28

Post by nukifw »

Milpotel wrote: post #26
johnisgood wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> difficulty to install Use opam: https://opam.ocaml.org or https://opam.ocaml.org/doc/Install.html . Additionally, see: https://ocaml.org/install#linux_mac_bsd and https://ocaml.org/docs/set-up-editor . It is easy to set up with Emacs, for example. VSCodium has OCaml extension as well. All you need for the OCaml compiler is opam, it handles all the packages and the compiler. For your project, use dune: https://dune.…

"use opam" is always the answer but in reality its the worst package manager ever. I've never seen so many packages fail to install, so many broken dependencies and miscompilations that resulted in segfaults due to wrong dependencies. I just gave up with Ocaml due to the crappy ecosystem, although I could have lived with the other idiosyncrasies.

There is a lot of work on Dune Package Management that will fix some legacy issues related to OPAM, https://dune.readthedocs.io/en/stable/tutorials/dune-package... !! Stay tuned!

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#29

Post by jappgar »

_mu wrote: post #6

I haven't worked in OCaml but I have worked a bit in F# and found it to be a pleasant experience. One thing I am wondering about in the age of LLMs is if we should all take a harder look at functional languages again. My thought is that if FP languages like OCaml / Haskell / etc. let us compress a lot of information into a small amount of text, then that's better for the context window. Possibly we might be able to p…

That was my optimistic take before I started working on a large Haskell code base.

Aside from the obvious problem that there's not enough FP in the training corpus, it seems like terser languages don't work all that well with LLMs.

My guess is that verbosity actually helps the generation self-correct... if it predicts some "bad" tokens it can pivot more easily and still produce working code.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#30

Post by nextos »

esafak wrote: post #17
_mu wrote: post #6

I haven't worked in OCaml but I have worked a bit in F# and found it to be a pleasant experience. One thing I am wondering about in the age of LLMs is if we should all take a harder look at functional languages again. My thought is that if FP languages like OCaml / Haskell / etc. let us compress a lot of information into a small amount of text, then that's better for the context window. Possibly we might be able to p…

I think LLMs benefit from training examples, static typing, and an LSP implementation more than terseness.

Exactly. My experience building a system that generates Dafny and Liquid Haskell is that you can get much further than with a language that is limited to dynamic or simple static types.
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