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Why I love OCaml (2023)

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Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#121

Post by [deleted] »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #60
ModernMech wrote: post #33

>why isn’t OCaml more popular? OCaml did become popular, but via Rust, which took the best parts of OCaml and made the language more imperative feeling. That's what OCaml was missing!

Rust is very different from Ocaml. Rust is a low level language with a borrow checkers, traits, no first class module system, no GADT, no effects. The similarities are fairly superficial actually. It’s just that Rust is less behind the PL forefront that people are used to and has old features which look impressive when you discover them like variants. There is little overlap between what you would sanely use Rust for…

[deleted]

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#122

Post by DrewADesign »

lenkite wrote: post #116
DrewADesign wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But how many things involve fulfilling basic requests over a network pulling information from a database? Most things just don’t need that kind of performance.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#123

Post by mbac32768 »

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…

A lot of these are learning curve issues, but once you scale them you still permanently suffer with a very deficient, fragmented ecosystem. Until you have built up your own curated set of dependencies for your business stack, anyway.

> * Ocamlfmt is pretty bad. It thinks it is writing prose. It will even put complex `match`es on one line if they fit. Really hurts readability.

I suggest configuring ocamlformat to use the janestreet profile for better defaults.

> * Optional type annotation for function signatures throws away a significant benefit of static typing - documentation/understanding and nice error messages.

People should be providing .mli files, but don't. That said, an IDE with type hints helps this enormously. The VS Code plugin for OCaml is the best experience for noobs, hands down.

> OPAM

yes

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#124

Post by dmpk2k »

lenkite wrote: post #116
DrewADesign wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is slower, but a big cause of the slowness is a lot of copying (immutable data structures and separate heaps for every process). Nowadays the BEAM has a JIT.

If you use type guards correctly the performance can be surprisingly good. Not C/C++/Rust/Go/Java good, but not too far off either. This is definitely a corner-case though.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#125

Post by DrewADesign »

cardanome wrote: post #93
DrewADesign wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 backend work I do is just super boring. I always wanted to learn Elixir but never had a project where it could show it strengths. Good old PHP works perfectly fine. Also corporations like their devs to be easily replaceable which is easier with more mainstream languages, so it is always hard for "newer" languages to gain traction. That said I am totally rooting for Elixir.

I think it’s great for boring stuff — the Phoenix web framework is really straightforward. Learning a whole new language paradigm and environment for a professional project you need to be productive in ASAP is definitely the worst kind of ‘not boring’ though.

I know of a Haskell shop and everybody said they’d have a hell of a time finding people… but all them nerds were (and are) tripping over themselves to work there because they love Haskell… though some I’ve talked to ended up not liking Haskell in production after working there. There seems to be a similar dynamic, if a bit less extreme, in Elixir shops.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#126

Post by thaumasiotes »

systems wrote: post #108
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…

+10 for bad windows support, i think this is a key and weirdly underestimated reason just to give an idea how bad, until recently, you could not just go to ocaml.org and download ocaml for windows, you had to either download one for mingw or wsl so for many it was just not installable, i.e. for many we didnt have ocaml for windows, until very very recently

> just to give an idea how bad, until recently, you could not just go to ocaml.org and download ocaml for windows

On the other hand, you could get ocaml for Windows from Microsoft ever since 2005.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#127

Post by mbac32768 »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #112
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…

I find F# nowhere near as good as OCaml and think this comparison is ugly, but if I was forced to use a .NET platform I would almost certainly use F#

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#128

Post by wk_end »

7thaccount wrote: post #105
procaryote wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but when these things happen I ask myself, is Jane Street successful because of ocaml, or did they just happen to pick ocaml and then make it work? There might be some power in attracting all the people who happen to love ocaml, if there are enough of competent people to staff your company, but that's more a case of cornering a small niche than picking on technical merits

They've spoken about this before and might not have picked OCaml if they had to make the decision again today. I think at the time it made the most sense.They can also make it work in any language as they claim to only recruit the best and brightest in the world (this may be the truth). My opinion is they could have chosen many languages and had similar results while balancing different trade-offs. Regarding attracti…

> I could be an OCaml expert and have no chance of making it through an interview without equal talent in high performance fintech and relevant mathematics.

Unless their hiring process has changed in the past few years, if you're a dev they're not hiring you for your financial skills, just general problem solving and software development ability. It is (was?) the usual Google-style algorithms/data structures rigamarole, but somewhat more challenging.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#129

Post by creata »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #3
dmpk2k wrote: post #2

OCaml 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.

> Because plenty of people have been shipping great projects in Ocaml

What applications are written in OCaml? All I can think of (which says more about me than it does about OCaml) is the original Rust compiler.

Even Haskell has Pandoc and Xmonad.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#130

Post by bigstrat2003 »

crdrost wrote: post #74
pluralmonad wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe many people use PL to mean programming language. I'm wondering if your joke just wooshed me.

I mean pohl's joke above whooshed kjmh so it's all fine. The important thing for threads like this one is for us to name drop all of the weird programming languages that we have used, publicly avow the greatness of ones that we have not, and make a New Year's resolution that we will never follow, to actually pick up those great languages and write something in them...

> make a New Year's resolution that we will never follow, to actually pick up those great languages and write something in them...

Why must you call me out in this way? How did I wrong you, that I deserve this?

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