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Why I love OCaml (2023)

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Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#211

Post by agentultra »

m3at wrote: post #184
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

Yeah, I can see that. At the time of the talk Feldman claims Python is a slow-and-steady language. It definitely did get a lot of support from the scientific/engineering community for a long time. I spent a good part of my career with Python from about 2006-2016.

It had boosts from Django... but it never had Rails' level of popularity. You kinda have to be first-to-market and that good to get the "killer app" effect.

It's also been integrated as the scripting language for several popular software pacakges (Blender comes to mind).

Machine learning and now... "AI"; seems to be a market cornered by Python quite a bit.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#212

Post by fud101 »

Syzygies wrote: post #209
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To decide on a language for a math research project, I implemented a toy problem in many languages: What is the distribution of cycle counts for signed permutations on n letters? Use all cores in parallel. C++ 100 19.57s Rust 96 20.40s F# 95 20.52s Nim 75 26.04s Julia 64 30.40s Ocaml 48 41.07s Haskell 41 47.64s Chez 39 49.53s Swift 33 58.46s Lean 7 278.88s Tarjan, n = 10 Nyx - Apple M4 Max - 12 performance and 4 effi…

Interesting, would be a good blog post to read.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#213

Post by bmitc »

int_19h wrote: post #182
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

F# has plenty of features that OCaml doesn't have like proper cross-platform support, proper deployment, active patterns, units of measure, computation expressions, type providers, interfaces on unions and records, etc. F# is probably faster as well and definitely has a larger ecosystem through .NET.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#214

Post by 7thaccount »

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# pretty much assumes you already know C#. I found that it made it hard to get up to speed on it. I really do enjoy the the syntax though.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#215

Post by aeonik »

m3at wrote: post #184
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

A MAJOR portion of popularity was because of this xkcd comic.

https://xkcd.com/353/

It hit the front page of Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, made the rounds on Hacker news, etc... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=86246)

Django was also very popular at the time.

I had already learned Basic, C++, Java, and C#. I wanted to add a dynamic scripting language that was cross-platform under my belt.

A lot of my peers were in the same boat.

Python seemed at the time, to be the only general purpose scripting language that was easy to use on multiple platforms.

I had heard bad things about Perl being write only, and Ruby being tough to deploy, I also found it hard to read. (Which is a shame they are wonderful languages, though Ruby is dog slow, Python is slow too, but Ruby is worse somehow).

IIRC Google and some other large companies were pushing it as one of their official languages.

Right as Python was rocketing in popularity, Go came out, and I also heard a lot of good things about Clojure (they seemed neck and neck in popularity from my incorrect perspective at the time, lol).

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#216

Post by neonsunset »

debugnik wrote: post #172
neonsunset wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has an edge on some domains due to having unboxed types If a language makes "unboxed types" a feature, a specific distinction, and has to sell "removing global lock" as something that is a massive breakthrough and not table stakes from 1.0, it can't possibly be compared to F# in favourable light.

I vouched for your dead comment because I get where you're coming from. But OCaml 1.0 was in 1996 in an academic setting. I care about the language I can use now, not the one I didn't use. Let's not dismiss that their solution to remove the global lock has been both simpler than Python's (better funded?) ongoing work and backwards compatible; and the multicore support came with both a memory model with strong guarant…

Ref structs are hard to solve because they require, in some ways, a lot more work than the way C# solved the lifetimes as the lifetimes in F# may need to become much closer to what they are in Rust. Some constructs may not be able to consume them still (can’t move ref struct into an object with effective lifetime ‘static) and there really is no easy solution short of language editions and breaking standard library changes. A limited improvement is possible, but we’re still in the realm where the lifetimes may become a part of type identity or somehow generalized over, which is hard.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#217

Post by kragen »

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.

In Haskell, yes, because laziness permits deforestation. ML, including OCaml, is eager and consequently cannot do this.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#218

Post by kragen »

obezyian wrote: post #210
mbac32768 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Windows support is bad because OCaml is a PL designed by people who are deep in Linux life. Windows is not something that keeps them up at night. (Which isn't to say they didn't try, just, you know, not as much as it takes) One of the things people often neglect to mention in their love letters to the language (except for Anil Madhavapeddy) is that it actually feels UNIXy. It feels like home.

> designed by people who are deep in Linux life. > it actually feels UNIXy. It feels like home. They use single dashes for long options. This is not home. https://linux.die.net/man/1/ocaml

Unix doesn't use double dashes for options; that's a GNU thing, and, as everyone knows, GNU's Not Unix.

Normally the Unix/GNU opposition is irrelevant at this point, but you managed to pick one of the few significant points of difference.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#219

Post by MrJohz »

kragen wrote: post #217
spooky_deep wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In Haskell, yes, because laziness permits deforestation. ML, including OCaml, is eager and consequently cannot do this.

I believe it's possible in theory - Koka has a whole "functional but in-place" set of compiler optimisations that essentially translate functional algorithms into imperative ones. But I think that's also possible in Koka in part because of its ownership rules that track where objects are created and freed, so might also not be feasible for OCaml.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#220

Post by kragen »

mbac32768 wrote: post #131
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

The Windows support is bad because OCaml is a PL designed by people who are deep in Linux life. Windows is not something that keeps them up at night. (Which isn't to say they didn't try, just, you know, not as much as it takes) One of the things people often neglect to mention in their love letters to the language (except for Anil Madhavapeddy) is that it actually feels UNIXy. It feels like home.

Caml was developed in 01985, Linux was first released in 01991, and Caml was extended into OCaml in 01996. I don't think the developers were using Linux at the time; SunOS 4 would be my best guess. I didn't work on it, but I was in the sort of internetty environment that OCaml came from, and I was using Solaris at work and got my first Linux box at home. As another commenter mentioned, the command line follows Unix conventions rather than the Linux conventions from GNU.
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