Why I love OCaml (2023)
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Why I love OCaml (2023)
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Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)
#2OCaml has been one of those "almost there" languages since at least 2002. Most of the worthwhile ideas in OCaml will be absorbed into more popular languages by the time existing friction is sorted out. :/
Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)
#3OCaml has been one of those "almost there" languages since at least 2002. Most of the worthwhile ideas in OCaml will be absorbed into more popular languages by the time existing friction is sorted out. :/
What is this alleged friction?
Because plenty of people have been shipping great projects in Ocaml since it was released so it doesn’t seem to be much of an issue to many.
I doubt Ocaml will be surpassed soon. They just added an effect system to the multicore rewrite so all things being considered, they seem to be pulling even more ahead.
Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)
#4OCaml has been one of those "almost there" languages since at least 2002. Most of the worthwhile ideas in OCaml will be absorbed into more popular languages by the time existing friction is sorted out. :/
Almost there, but in the meantime supporting a casual squillion dollars of trades at JS
Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)
#5OCaml has been one of those "almost there" languages since at least 2002. Most of the worthwhile ideas in OCaml will be absorbed into more popular languages by the time existing friction is sorted out. :/
What is this alleged friction? Because plenty of people have been shipping great projects in Ocaml since it was released so it doesn’t seem to be much of an issue to many. I doubt Ocaml will be surpassed soon. They just added an effect system to the multicore rewrite so all things being considered, they seem to be pulling even more ahead.
Alleged? Come now.
Beginners face the following problems: there's multiple standard libraries, many documents are barely more than type signatures, and data structures aren't printable by default. Experts also face the problem of a very tiny library ecosystem, and tooling that's often a decade behind more mainstream languages (proper gdb support when?). OCaml added multicore support recently, but now there is the whole Eio/Lwt/Async thing.
I used to be a language nerd long ago. Many a fine hour spent on LtU. But ultimately, the ecosystem's size dwarfs the importance of the language itself. I'm sympathetic, since I'm a Common Lisp man, but I don't kid myself either: Common Lisp isn't (e.g.) Rust. I like hacking with a relic of the past, and that's okay too.
Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)
#6OCaml has been one of those "almost there" languages since at least 2002. Most of the worthwhile ideas in OCaml will be absorbed into more popular languages by the time existing friction is sorted out. :/
Perhaps OCaml is the Velvet Underground of languages. Only a few thousand people learned OCaml but every one made a programming language[1]
Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)
#7To this day, whenever I see Machine Learning abbreviated, my heart skips a beat, then I become crestfallen as I realize I'm not about to read something about Meta Language.
Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)
#8Offtopic HTML issue to the author: there is a trailing tag at the end of your generated HTML after the (instead of ).
Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)
#9> It is an old language, and there are a few features that could probably be left out like the OOP-related features, and some libraries in the ecosystem over-complicate things like in Haskell.
If one can stand a language that is just a little bit older, there is always Standard ML. It is like OCaml, but perfect!
Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)
#10> It is an old language, and there are a few features that could probably be left out like the OOP-related features, and some libraries in the ecosystem over-complicate things like in Haskell. If one can stand a language that is just a little bit older, there is always Standard ML. It is like OCaml, but perfect!
I love standard ml (I'm currently writing a compiler for it), but it's far from perfect. There are weird special cases in the language definition like the ad-hoc overloading between int and real, or the annoying value restriction. Records also feel half-baked, with no support for updating fields or for partially-specified records where the full set of fields is not known