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Why I love OCaml (2023)

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Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#181

Post by zdragnar »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #88
zdragnar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're building another JS, it'd be nice if there were other companies so heavily invested in it. There's a lot out there beyond compiler prototypes and high speed financial trades, but there's not enough talk of people using ocaml for those things.

Ocaml was (historically, at least) used by Facebook for basically all of their linter/compiler/type checker work. The hack checker was in Ocaml, as was the JS thing (flow, maybe?). So that does seem to be a good use-case for the language.

That was why I mentioned compilers along with HFT. Rust was originally an ocaml based compiler too.

I don't build HFTs and my compilers are just for fun. None of my day jobs have ever been a situation where the smaller ecosystem and community of ocaml was offset by anything ocaml did better than the selected options like .net, Java, go, rails, C or anything else I've touched. Heck, I've written more zig for an employer than ocaml, and that was for a toy DSL engine that we never ended up using.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#182

Post by int_19h »

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…

F# is indeed an ML-family language, but at this point it doesn't have all that much in common with OCaml specifically: it doesn't have the latter's structurally typed object model with inferred row-polymorphic types, nor its extremely powerful module system, not even many convenience features like open variants.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#183

Post by spooky_deep »

olivia-banks wrote: post #161
kristianp wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Like all FP languages it has a weird obsession with singly linked lists, which are actually a pretty awful data structure This made me chuckle. I've had that thought before, shouldn't the default be a vector on modern devices? Of course other collection types are available.

I'd say that functional programming is probably one of the only domains where linked lists actually make sense. Vectors certainty have their use in more places though.

A good compiler will make the lists disappear in many cases. No runtime overhead. I actually love single linked lists as a way to break down sequences of problem steps.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#184

Post by m3at »

agentultra wrote: post #103

Why isn't it more popular? I think Richard Feldman [0] proposed some of the most reasonable theories as to why functional programming isn't the norm. Your language needs to be the platform-exclusive language for a widely used platform, have a killer application for a highly desired application domain, or be backed by a monster war-chest of marketing money to sway opinions. Since Feldman's talk, Python has grown much…

> mostly because it's the scripting language of choice for PyTorch and AI-adjacent libraries/tooling/frameworks

I would politely disagree. Torch started in Lua, and switched to Python because of its already soaring popularity. Whatever drove Python's growth predates modern AI frameworks

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#185

Post by int_19h »

kristianp wrote: post #149
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…

> * Like all FP languages it has a weird obsession with singly linked lists, which are actually a pretty awful data structure This made me chuckle. I've had that thought before, shouldn't the default be a vector on modern devices? Of course other collection types are available.

The reason why functional languages like linked lists so much is because they are very easy to make immutable without a lot of pain all around. If you implement an immutable vector in a straightforward way, though, you basically need to do a lot of copying for any operation that needs to construct one (the rigmarole with immutable strings, and existence of hacks such as StringBuilder, is a good illustration of the problem).

But you can have a data structure that is more like vector under the hood while still supporting efficient copy-with-modifications. Clojure vectors, for example.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#186

Post by int_19h »

spooky_deep wrote: post #183
olivia-banks wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that functional programming is probably one of the only domains where linked lists actually make sense. Vectors certainty have their use in more places though.

A good compiler will make the lists disappear in many cases. No runtime overhead. I actually love single linked lists as a way to break down sequences of problem steps.

Why would a specific way of structuring data in memory be relevant to breaking down sequences of problem steps?

If what you mean is the ability to think in terms of "first" and "rest", that's just an interface that doesn't have to be backed by a linked list implementation.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#187

Post by [deleted] »

rootnod3 wrote: post #138

I absolutely love the idea and methods behind OCaml, but the syntax..... I also love Haskell and already feel that its syntax is not easy to grok on larger projects, but OCaml basically went "hold my beer" and went to town on that.

[deleted]

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#188

Post by int_19h »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #126
systems wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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.

F# is not "OCaml for Windows". Not even close.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#189

Post by bsder »

vvpan wrote: post #68
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…

If it's functional (recursion vs imperative loops) most people/organizations will not use it. At this point that is just the reality.

I really wish people would quit pushing "functional". People equate that with "My programming is now always a recursive logic puzzle."

Talk about "immutable by default". Talk about "strong typing". Talk about "encapsulating side effects". Talk about "race free programming".

Those are the things that programmers currently care about. A lot of current Rust programmers are people who came there almost exclusively for "strong typing".

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#190

Post by abathologist »

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!

As someone who has worked professionally in both, programming in rust does not feel much like programming in OCaml. Working with traits in an imperative manual memory managed language is really different than working with proper modules in a mixed paradigm language with an awesome GC.
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