This mindset (i.e. LLMs are available so why do i need to learn anything?) is highly insidious and will destroy your brain/mind/future if you let it.

Humans are the ones who Understand, while LLMs only Know.

So inter-disciplinary/cross-disciplinary insights, new modes of thinking/reasoning, flashes of insight etc. are still in the purview of Humans only. AI/LLMs can help focus and short-circuit the study of various subjects but their understanding can only happen within a human "Mind". If you do not even have basic domain knowledge (i.e. unknown unknowns) how can you even prompt/query an LLM for answers?

A few illustrative examples; a) Newton came up with limits/calculus out of a need to measure continuous motion with varying speeds b) Kekule came up with the benzene ring from a dream where he saw a snake grab its own tail c) Descartes came up with the cartesian coordinates in an attempt to solve geometry via algebra etc. Each of these was a novel leap of insight bringing together various concepts to create entirely new knowledge domains.

So one should learn/study the core concepts/ideas in various domains and then push the tedious mechanical labour onto the machines. In this regard see also the concept of "Active Learning" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_learning

You can also learn for your own amusement, and solely for the fun of comprehension; a lot of mathematician were driven by this. It's a shame current social value places so much utilitariaism on learning.

My experience with OCaml has transformed how I think about programming and complex system design. This may also be true if you learn any other functional programming language, but OCaml is easy and flexible which makes it good imo as a door towards the more formal part of comp sci. Even for steering an LLM I think this might help.

Michael Clarkson teaches OCaml at Cornell. I highly recommend his free course materials [1]. He’s an excellent educator. Learning functional programming paradigms had a major influence on how I design programs. Clarkson also taught snippets from the Pragmatic Programmer, which was equally influential (as it has been for many many others) [2].

[1] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs3110/2025sp/

[2] https://pragprog.com/titles/tpp20/the-pragmatic-programmer-2...

You could have asked this question 10 years ago, long before llms. It's not like you'd realistically would get an ocaml job back then when there's so few of them, so why bother?

The answer is still the same as well, people learn ocaml either because they enjoy it, or because learning a functional language makes them a better programmer overall and teaches your brain to approach a problem in a different way.

Outsourcing all the thinking to machines may have consequences you might not like.

An oblique explanation: https://croissanthology.com/earring

Posting 'why should we learn' a programming language on Hacker News is top-quality ragebait :-D

Should you learn history if it is already written in a book? Should you live if others are already living?

> So (asking genuinely), should we learn these things?

I wanted to learn a functional programming language with powerful type capabilities and I chose the Lean Language for that and not OCamel or Haskell. Reason being: Better type system (dependent types!), applicable in formal domains and can use it to learn math too.

For your bread and butter programming, there is already JS/Go anyways.

So don't see much point in learning OCamel.

Why learn an instrument when you can just press play?

Seeing that you already know programming, I'd say it'd be less risky for you. But the only reason you're able to pilot an LLM to do programming for you, is because you understand programming and architecture.

But what about the future generations skipping the step of learning the OCaml's, the C's, the Python's...? It's quite concerning.

Oh by the way, yes. Learn OCaml!

Keep using your brain or you will forget stuff. Doing puzzles is great, programming in new languages is also great.

you are eventually going to have a very bad time if you do not have a solid mental model of the code the LLM is writing, and indeed if you cannot steer the LLM so that its code conforms to your mental models. learning ocaml is a great way to add some valuable tools to your toolkit when it comes to thinking about code and how it fits together.

LLM + static types is a winning combo. And if you want to be serious with what you do with your LLM, you need to understand the output to some extent.

That being said, you may as well use Rust. The extra complexity of manual memory management and Rust idiosyncracies are easily dealt with by the LLM.

LLMs are better at OCaml than any other language, and being able to read and think in OCaml is very helpful to understanding LLM generated OCaml code.

Also, it may very well be the decade of formal verification - if so, OCaml is a good place to be.

I would sharpen my software engineering skills rather than coding / programming skills.

Yes. LLMs do not know anything, and they will make mistakes as a result. You have to be able to check their work if you wish to do a good job.

I think it's helpful to have a deep understanding of one c-type language, one lisp, and one ML-type language. There are so many things influenced by these three language families that being comfortable with them makes it so much easier to understand a wide variety of languages and libraries.

LLMs know it anyways?

Hhhmmmmm

I mean if you want to let llms do everything for you go ahead. Wall-e implications aside, it seems like a great self centric life.

I would not make that dependent on LLMs. If OCaml covers a use case you have, why not.

Personally I try to stick within my own niche though - ruby, java and also python (ruby is unfortunately losing grounds really hard now, the writing was on the well in the last some years though, and people such as DHH are now indeed a liability rather than an asset to be had, but that's a side topic).

I think what LLMs will force in the long run is to make programming languages used by real humans in a traditional way, more effective. That is, writing code by humans will have to become a lot more efficient, both time-wise and speed-wise. And for that there is always a use case IMO since LLMs are, despite the promo, incredibly stupid.

What the hell else do you have to do?!

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