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agentultraHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I like OCaml

… I like OCaml. I started evaluating functional programming in it by taking the INRIA course online. I spent the last four and half years working in Haskell. I've built some side projects in Zig. I was a CL stan for many years. I asked this question a lot. We often say, "use the best tool for the job." Often that means, "use the tool that's available." I think languages like OCaml, Rust, Haskell etc can be "popular," but in the sense that people like to talk about them and want to learn them and be able to use them (at least, as trends come and go). It's different from "popular" as in, "widely adopted." [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4

Original discussionWhy I love OCaml (2023)296 source comments · at import
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m3atHN

> 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

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atombenderHN

I look at how people write TypeScript these days, and think about how the world might have been different if, 10-15 years ago, these functional languages had been a bit closer to the imperative world. OCaml allows mutation and side effects and could even feel a bit imperative if it weren't for the "let ... in" syntax. Let's face it, syntax matters. We saw that with Elixir becoming much more popular than Erlang ever did. We saw it with TypeScript being able to introduce a fairly complex type system into JavaScript, and becoming successful among web devs by adapting to established ecosystem and offering a gradual approach, rather than forcing an entirely new, incompatible paradigm on it. The TypeScript story seems a little improbable in hindsight, but it was able to get there by offering an incremental path and making a lot of compromises (such as config options to allow less strict enforc…

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