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Why I love OCaml (2023)

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Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#111

Post by dmpk2k »

ernst_klim wrote: post #32
dmpk2k wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 who…

TBH I think it's rather a post-hoc rationalization of why the language is not popular. > there's multiple standard libraries Scala has a far more fragmented ecosystem with Cats, Scalaz, Zio and Akka. C++ and Java have a bunch of stdlib extensions like boost, Guava, Apache Commons etc. > many documents are barely more than type signatures Can be said of most of Java, Kotlin, Scala, Erlang etc etc. Just compiled javado…

Maybe it's post-hoc?

I wanted to use OCaml since 2002, since it was a GC'd language with good performance, achieving a lot with relatively few lines of code. Being a language nerd, I was (am?) positively inclined to the language. Yet there was always something that made it notably less pleasant to solve my current problem in than in than some other language.

If it had trouble getting traction with me, that's bad news.

Meanwhile the mainstream has progressed a lot since 2000. GC is the standard, closures are normal, pattern matching and destructuring are increasingly so. While HM-style type inference is not mainstream, local type inference is (and I'm no longer convinced that global type inference is the way). Algebraic data types aren't unusual anymore.

A few years back I just threw in the towel and went with Rust; this happened after I volunteered to improve OCaml's gdb support (including DWARF hell), which went nowhere. I wish Rust compiled faster, and a GC'd language is usually more productive for my problems, but in every other regard it stole what should have been OCaml's thunder. And when popular successor languages eventually appear, they'll do it even better.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#112

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

timhh wrote: post #96

> why isn’t OCaml more popular I've used OCaml a bit and found various issues with it: * Terrible Windows support. With OCaml 5 it's upgraded to "pretty bad". * The syntax is hard to parse for humans. Often it turns into a word soup, without any helpful punctuation to tell you what things are. It's like reading a book with no paragraphs, capitalisation or punctuation. * The syntax isn't recoverable. Sometimes you can…

I would suggest that people interested in using OCaml on Windows (or indeed, OCaml at all) try F# instead. It is still an ML-family language. Incidentally, by targeting the CLR, F# is considerably more deployable (both to users and to developers) than OCaml is. Plus, any old NuGet library written in C# or VB.NET can be used almost trivially in F#. This also solves the problem OP listed about a tiny ecosystem, because the C#/.NET ecosystem is massive.

I couldn't agree more with the parent commenter about OCaml documentation. Functional programmers appear to love terseness to an almost extreme degree. Things like `first` are abbreviated to `fst`, which is just odd. Especially now that good IntelliSense means there is no real functional (heh) difference between typing `.fi` and pressing Tab, and typing `.fs` and pressing Tab.

The F# documentation is comparatively very spiffy and detailed, with plenty of examples[1][2][3].

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/dotnet/fsharp/language-ref...

[2]: https://fsharp.github.io/fsharp-core-docs/

[3]: https://fsprojects.github.io/fsharp-cheatsheet/fsharp-cheats...

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#113

Post by hollerith »

dmpk2k wrote: post #111
ernst_klim wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH I think it's rather a post-hoc rationalization of why the language is not popular. > there's multiple standard libraries Scala has a far more fragmented ecosystem with Cats, Scalaz, Zio and Akka. C++ and Java have a bunch of stdlib extensions like boost, Guava, Apache Commons etc. > many documents are barely more than type signatures Can be said of most of Java, Kotlin, Scala, Erlang etc etc. Just compiled javado…

Maybe it's post-hoc? I wanted to use OCaml since 2002, since it was a GC'd language with good performance, achieving a lot with relatively few lines of code. Being a language nerd, I was (am?) positively inclined to the language. Yet there was always something that made it notably less pleasant to solve my current problem in than in than some other language. If it had trouble getting traction with me , that's bad new…

GC was standard already in 2000: Perl, Python, Ruby, Java and JS all had GC from day 1.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#114

Post by timeon »

japhib wrote: post #51

Elixir is the closest thing to OCaml that has a chance at semi-mainstream usage IMO. It has basically all of the stuff about functional programming that makes it easier to reason about your code & get work done - immutability, pattern matching, actors, etc. But without monads or a complicated type system that would give it a higher barrier to entry. And of course it's built on top of the Erlang BEAM runtime, which ha…

I do not think that monads/type system are issue, but yes BEAM runtime is killer feature.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#116

Post by lenkite »

DrewADesign wrote: post #53
japhib wrote: post #51

Elixir is the closest thing to OCaml that has a chance at semi-mainstream usage IMO. It has basically all of the stuff about functional programming that makes it easier to reason about your code & get work done - immutability, pattern matching, actors, etc. But without monads or a complicated type system that would give it a higher barrier to entry. And of course it's built on top of the Erlang BEAM runtime, which ha…

I think it’s odd that elixir doesn’t get more love. It ticks a lot of boxes that folks here get excited about, has a great ecosystem and tooling, BEAM is great, and it’s much more syntactically familiar than erlang to my eye. I know of a couple companies aside from the perennial goto examples that built sizable saas products backed by it.

The BEAM VM executing bytecode is slower than a compiled binary. Sure, it is great when compared to Python and other interpreted languages. Not so much when you need fast processing and raw CPU performance. It also loses out to the JVM in performance, but wins in memory consumption.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#117

Post by debugnik »

Nelkins wrote: post #63
ernst_klim wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd like to hear some practical reasons for preferring OCaml over F# Bigger native ecosystem. C#/.net integration is a double edged sword: a lot of libraries, but the libraries are not written in canonical F#. A lot of language features F# misses, like effect handlers, modules, GADTs etc.

There are libraries that simulate a lot of these things (e.g. https://github.com/G-Research/TypeEquality for GADTs). You're absolutely right that it's not as first class as in OCaml, but the tools are there if you want them.

I've written type-equality witnesses in F#, they can kinda recover type equalities (with cast methods) but not refute them, so you still need to raise exceptions for those cases.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#118

Post by dmpk2k »

hollerith wrote: post #113
dmpk2k wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's post-hoc? I wanted to use OCaml since 2002, since it was a GC'd language with good performance, achieving a lot with relatively few lines of code. Being a language nerd, I was (am?) positively inclined to the language. Yet there was always something that made it notably less pleasant to solve my current problem in than in than some other language. If it had trouble getting traction with me , that's bad new…

GC was standard already in 2000: Perl, Python, Ruby, Java and JS all had GC from day 1.

Crappy GC for most of them, but... fair point.
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