alt Hacker NewsLearn Programming with OCaml
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Tangentially, a great interview with the creator of OCaml, Xavier Leroy [1].
This is the best OCaml resource I know, and I have gone through it in full, and highly recommend:
CS3110: OCaml Programming: Correct + Efficient + Beautiful [0]
It is one of the best programming resources that I know of.
I do really wonder what it would be like to learn to program for the first time with OCaml.
I remember learning to use OCaml in a properly functional way after so long writing code in C and it was really miserably painful trying to change how I thought about algorithms. I eventually got over the hill and it changed how I write code in C (for the better?), but I do wonder if it would have been easier to have learned OCaml as a first language instead.
> Learn Programming with OCaml
Lately, I keep asking myself, do I need to learn this new thing, should I force myself to learn this thing, LLMs know it anyways and so on.
So (asking genuinely), should we learn these things?
This book, while excellent otherwise, is much too harder for beginners, IMO. The pace is too brisk, and it's far from pedagogically useful if you don't already know how to program.
OCaml programmers, what learning resource would you recommend starting out with? I know there's https://cs3110.github.io/textbook/chapters/basics/intro.html. How does this book compare? Anything else you would recommend?
The French original version of the book appears to be 12 years old (2014). Is the English translation linked here a somehow more up to date book?
What is the recommended GUI framework for OCaml? (Please don't say HTML)
I know a few programs written in OCaml such as weidu.
OCaml is a very strange programming language. I don't think it will be able to sustain e. g. success stories of other languages, such as python.
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OCaml is the LLM secret weapon right now. They are better at writing it than they are any other language.* That’s all I have to say about it.
* Other “pure” hindley-milner languages are tied but among them ocaml has some particular strengths that I’m sure others will discuss.
I believe that an ML should be the First Language for Computer Scientists. It's much less clear which language we should teach people for whom it will likely be their Only Language, today Python is common, and for fields which care about stats often R is used, I've also seen Java used in this role. But for a First Language specifically I am in no doubt that an ML should be chosen, and this is despite the fact that the University where I work has taught Java for decades and Python most recently as First Language.
I'm an old man, I learned the Standard ML of New Jersey when I was an undergraduate many years ago, but I'm pretty sure that experience though it isn't irrelevant, did not overly colour my belief in what we [speaking broadly of humanity] ought to teach.