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Learn Programming with OCaml

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Re: Learn Programming with OCaml

#31

Post by giraffe_lady »

phtrivier wrote: post #28
giraffe_lady wrote: post #14

OCaml is the LLM secret weapon right now. They are better at writing it than they are any other language.* That’s all I have to say about it. * Other “pure” hindley-milner languages are tied but among them ocaml has some particular strengths that I’m sure others will discuss.

Flamebait aside, has this been studied for real ? Curious how you would rate that...

Yes I contributed code to a paper on it this spring. It’s hard to measure and “studying” it just means feeding money into frontier models. If anyone has a few billion tokens for a couple masters students hmu so they can get it published.

Re: Learn Programming with OCaml

#32

Post by sweetjuly »

I do really wonder what it would be like to learn to program for the first time with OCaml.

I remember learning to use OCaml in a properly functional way after so long writing code in C and it was really miserably painful trying to change how I thought about algorithms. I eventually got over the hill and it changed how I write code in C (for the better?), but I do wonder if it would have been easier to have learned OCaml as a first language instead.

Re: Learn Programming with OCaml

#33

Post by henryrobbins00 »

throwaw12 wrote: post #2

> Learn Programming with OCaml Lately, I keep asking myself, do I need to learn this new thing, should I force myself to learn this thing, LLMs know it anyways and so on. So (asking genuinely), should we learn these things?

Michael Clarkson teaches OCaml at Cornell. I highly recommend his free course materials [1]. He’s an excellent educator. Learning functional programming paradigms had a major influence on how I design programs. Clarkson also taught snippets from the Pragmatic Programmer, which was equally influential (as it has been for many many others) [2].

[1] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs3110/2025sp/

[2] https://pragprog.com/titles/tpp20/the-pragmatic-programmer-2...

Re: Learn Programming with OCaml

#35

Post by andsoitis »

throwaw12 wrote: post #2

> Learn Programming with OCaml Lately, I keep asking myself, do I need to learn this new thing, should I force myself to learn this thing, LLMs know it anyways and so on. So (asking genuinely), should we learn these things?

I would sharpen my software engineering skills rather than coding / programming skills.

Re: Learn Programming with OCaml

#36

Post by steve1977 »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #14

OCaml is the LLM secret weapon right now. They are better at writing it than they are any other language.* That’s all I have to say about it. * Other “pure” hindley-milner languages are tied but among them ocaml has some particular strengths that I’m sure others will discuss.

Did you also compare F#?

Re: Learn Programming with OCaml

#37

Post by [deleted] »

toolslive wrote: post #17
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cultural inertia: until recently, you couldn't just press play and get even a wide selection of music: for most of history, if you wanted music, you had to make it or hire someone to do it for you. More recently, you had to go to the store and buy it, which meant you didn't have much variety. Today, learning an instrument is for social status, inheriting the shine of the past, where music was rare and costly. The rea…

your body needs exercise or you end up an obese couch potato. Your mind is similar: it needs exercise or you end up a dunce.

[deleted]

Re: Learn Programming with OCaml

#38

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

jonahx wrote: post #20
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cultural inertia: until recently, you couldn't just press play and get even a wide selection of music: for most of history, if you wanted music, you had to make it or hire someone to do it for you. More recently, you had to go to the store and buy it, which meant you didn't have much variety. Today, learning an instrument is for social status, inheriting the shine of the past, where music was rare and costly. The rea…

These theories sound vaguely plausible. I would rate them as about 5% true and 95% false, as explanation of the past and prediction of the future. The satisfaction of learning to do something difficult isn't going away, and the social status associated with it won't either.

Sure, I guess. But today, something like 30% of people play music or sing regularly enough to say they do it (ie, not very much at all). Even a couple of generations ago, it was much higher. It's not going to die out, but I think a lot of people are asking themselves if they want to bother.

Re: Learn Programming with OCaml

#39

Post by Barrin92 »

underlipton wrote: post #27
xiaoyu2006 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also learn for your own amusement, and solely for the fun of comprehension; a lot of mathematician were driven by this. It's a shame current social value places so much utilitariaism on learning.

As always, it is good to be aware that many people are too anxious about more existential issues to comfortably an consistently expend effort on intellectually-taxing tasks that aren't perceived as directly related to their survival. If it's an issue with social values, it's less of one related to learning as it is to perpetuating artificial scarcity.

>to comfortably an consistently expend effort on intellectually-taxing tasks that aren't perceived as directly related to their survival.

the average person spends 6(!) hours a day on their smartphone, the average TikTok user spends 100 minutes on the app alone. This isn't about artificial scarcity, it's about the average person looking like the Wall-E people

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