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Why I love OCaml (2023)

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Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#51

Post by japhib »

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 has a great track record as a foundation for backend systems. It doesn't have static typing, although the type system is a lot stronger than most other dynamic languages like JS or Python, and the language devs are currently adding gradual type checking into the compiler.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#52

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

dmpk2k wrote: post #5
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 who…

> there's multiple standard libraries

There is only one standard library and it shipped with the compiler.

> data structures aren't printable by default

So? That’s the case with most languages. Ocaml has a deriver to make types printable and a REPL which automatically prints for testing.

> tooling that's often a decade behind more mainstream languages

Opam is a fully featured package manager, dune works fine, bucks2 supports Ocaml.

> proper gdb support when?

Ocaml has had a rewindable debugger since approximately forever.

> OCaml added multicore support recently, but now there is the whole Eio/Lwt/Async thing.

Lwt was the default and everyone agrees eio is the future now that effects are there. Async is a Janestreet thing with pretty much no impact on the language outside of Janestreet.

Honestly, I maintained my initial point. Ocaml alleged frictions were always widely overstated.

When I was writing Ocaml professionally 15 years ago, there was no dune and no opam and it was already fairly easy to use the language.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#53

Post by DrewADesign »

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.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#54

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

ng12 wrote: post #50
wrenky wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our hope is that these extensions can over time be contributed to upstream OCaml. Yeah, its more just extensions to support their use cases at scale. Think of it more as bleeding edge ocmal, once they work out kinks/concerns they'll get merged back into the language OR if it remains ultra specific it'll stay in oxcaml. Not a complete own version lol

Yes but the context of the thread is OCaml being "almost there". Having to build this stuff in-house is pretty good evidence.

Evidence of what?

The main user has been writing extensions to the compiler that they test before pushing for integration like they have done for the past twenty years or so. They publish these versions since last year.

Hardly a failure and certainly not something mandatory to keep things from failing over. Your initial comment is extremely disingenuous.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#55

Post by pluralmonad »

embedding-shape wrote: post #34
kjmh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ML refers to Meta Language and LLM refers to Languages and Logic Montreal [0], a PL theory group. [0] https://llm.uqam.ca

> PL theory group I know there are great many Polish people in the world, but why it matters so much in this case? They could have been any nationality, even French!

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

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#57

Post by skybrian »

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.

What does deployment look like? Can you get a static binary easily like with Go?

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#58

Post by yujzgzc »

I loved Ocaml but now I love TypeScript more. It's got about the same amount of type safety, the ergonomics are better to me, and the packaging and ecosystem tooling are leaps and bounds above anything else.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#59

Post by pluralmonad »

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.

Elixir is good at managing complexity. I love flattening hierarchy and dealing with edge cases right in function definitions using pattern matching. Every other language without it just feels crippled after getting used to the feature.

Re: Why I love OCaml (2023)

#60

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

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 and what you would use Ocaml for. It’s just that weirdly people use Rust for things it’s not really suited for.

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