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Learn Programming with OCaml

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Re: Learn Programming with OCaml

#52

Post by yawaramin »

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?

Posting 'why should we learn' a programming language on Hacker News is top-quality ragebait :-D

Re: Learn Programming with OCaml

#53

Post by shakna »

veqq wrote: post #15

Why is the PDF smaller than the Epub file?

The ePub contains both SVGs and PNGs, the latter of which doesn't compress all that well for "plain zip", which an ePub is.

The PDF on the other hand gets to use zlib for streaming all the objects. It gets half decent compression.

Re: Learn Programming with OCaml

#54

Post by rahimnathwani »

nestorD wrote: post #41
sweetjuly wrote: post #32

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 O…

I did so! (quirks of the path I took in the French educational system) I went through a book similar to the one above, with no internet connection. The first few weeks were rough: I did not quite know what a type was and the compiler error messages were unforgiving and hard to understand without that context. But, once I grokked the core ideas (a proper idea of what could be done with recursion took much longer), thi…

How old were you?

Re: Learn Programming with OCaml

#55

Post by zem »

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?

you are eventually going to have a very bad time if you do not have a solid mental model of the code the LLM is writing, and indeed if you cannot steer the LLM so that its code conforms to your mental models. learning ocaml is a great way to add some valuable tools to your toolkit when it comes to thinking about code and how it fits together.

Re: Learn Programming with OCaml

#57

Post by giraffe_lady »

Fiodel wrote: post #50
giraffe_lady wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will add you to the list, I’ll definitely post it on HN also. They had originally planned on june and my part is in so…. Me too.

I'm interested too - besides the paper, is it your personal experience that working with llms on ocaml is superior to other languages? I thought with the sheer amount of training data languages like python and java would be "ideal"

No it’s more about speed and quality of the feedback loop. So you want the compiler that catches the most stuff when given the least information.

Re: Learn Programming with OCaml

#59

Post by Barrin92 »

Avicebron wrote: post #45
Barrin92 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

Escapism and making a concentrated effort on something are two different things. Yes it would probably be good if you could flip a switch and use the small windows of time we look at our phone per day to study OCaml, but it's not really realistic.. People who are asking these questions are saying "will me spending my time learning OCaml help me land that job that pays six figures and has health insurance so I can not…

>use the small windows of time we look at our phone

again, it's not a small window. It's six hours. That's almost half your waking day. People spend virtually their entire leisure time rotting away on low quality entertainment.

>will me spending my time learning OCaml help me land that job

that's a pointless question for one you never know if something will land you a job, new opportunities don't open up before you do something, secondly the relevant question is, should I stop doing X and start learning Ocaml, or Chinese, or take a welding class because all of that even if it doesn't work out beats scrolling through Instagram.

I don't even take offense with the idea that you engage in activity that makes you money, because pure selfishness on that front would be an improvement to what most people are doing now.

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