[Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[Benjamin C. Pierce]

Are there any programming environments out there for OCaml that are
especially well suited to beginning programmers?

At the University of Pennsylvania, we teach our intro programming course
for CS majors in OCaml (and later Java).  At the moment, we are using
Emacs (with tuareg mode) as the "programming environment," but we're not
very happy with it -- there's too much (dangerous) power, and all the
control-F stuff is unintuitive for kids that have been raised on MS
Word.  Teaching programming to beginners is hard enough without turning
editing into a big deal.

One obvious improvement would be to build an Emacs mode that hides almost
all of its power and offers Word-like mouse- and keybindings.  This would
be pretty easy.

But even better would be a *real* IDE for beginners.  (After all, the
Scheme community has the very wonderful DrScheme environment...)  Is
there one?  

Or, if not, would there be interest in the community in creating one?

     Benjamin



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Re: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[Michel Schinz]

"Benjamin C. Pierce" <bcpierce@saul.cis.upenn.edu> writes:

[...]

> One obvious improvement would be to build an Emacs mode that hides
> almost all of its power and offers Word-like mouse- and keybindings.
> This would be pretty easy.

For this part (at least for the Windows bindings), you could already
use CUA mode, which can be found there:

http://www.cua.dk/cua.html

Michel.
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Re: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[Warp]

> One obvious improvement would be to build an Emacs mode that hides
> almost
> all of its power and offers Word-like mouse- and keybindings.  This
> would
> be pretty easy.
> 
> But even better would be a *real* IDE for beginners.  (After all, the
> Scheme community has the very wonderful DrScheme environment...)  Is
> there one?  
> 
> Or, if not, would there be interest in the community in creating one?

That will be one part of my summer work for Lexifi (member of OCaml consortium).
That list will be informed of further advance.

Nicolas Cannasse
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Re: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[Warp]

> > One obvious improvement would be to build an Emacs mode that hides
> > almost
> > all of its power and offers Word-like mouse- and keybindings.  This
> > would
> > be pretty easy.
> >
> > But even better would be a *real* IDE for beginners.  (After all, the
> > Scheme community has the very wonderful DrScheme environment...)  Is
> > there one?
> >
> > Or, if not, would there be interest in the community in creating one?
>
> That will be one part of my summer work for Lexifi (member of OCaml
consortium).
> That list will be informed of further advance.

About this subject, I would like to make a public Request for Features, in
order to gather many opinions and tips about that IDE . ( which will be at
the same time for beginners AND for experienced people ).

Nicolas Cannasse

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Re: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[John Max Skaller]

Benjamin C. Pierce wrote:

>Are there any programming environments out there for OCaml that are
>especially well suited to beginning programmers?
>
There is an editor called Red which was developed as a component
of the IDE for the OO programming language Blue developed
at the University of Sydeny for teaching.

Last time I looked, Red needed some work .. but it is easily
the best general purpose "easy to use" text editor ever written.
Its key feature is that it is menu driven, but when you
pull down a menu you have the option of binding a key
to the operation by simply pressing the key, or learning
the default binding.
 
You might try finding Judy Kay from the staff
pages of cs.usyd.edu.au if you have any interest.
Its possible you could link ocaml into the IDE
instead of the Blue compiler... heh .. if you can
convince usyd to give up on OO and start teaching
FP it would be nice too :-)

-- 
John Max Skaller, mailto:skaller@ozemail.com.au
snail:10/1 Toxteth Rd, Glebe, NSW 2037, Australia.
voice:61-2-9660-0850




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Re: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[Yozo TODA]

> Are there any programming environments out there for OCaml that are
> especially well suited to beginning programmers?

how about ocamlbrowser?

-- yozo.
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Re: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[Gerard Huet]

>About this subject, I would like to make a public Request for Features, in
>order to gather many opinions and tips about that IDE . ( which will be at
>the same time for beginners AND for experienced people ).
>
>Nicolas Cannasse

Bonjour.
Ma première requête est que l'IDE soit basé sur la syntaxe abstraite d'Ocaml,
et que les outils liés à la syntaxe concrète (macros emacs et autres) soient
paramétrés par la grammaire camlp4, de manière à pouvoir se décliner aussi
bien pour la syntaxe révisée que pour la syntaxe ordinaire. Ceci n'est pas
une feature, c'est une décision importante d'architecture. Ainsi les débutants
pourront apprendre la bonne syntaxe, alors que les habitués pourront continuer
à éditer leurs programmes dans la syntaxe dont ils ont l'habitude
Gérard Huet

Hello
My first request is that the IDE ought to be based on Ocaml's abstract syntax,
and that the tools dealing with the concrete syntax (such as emacs macros) be
parameterized by the camlp4 grammar, so as to be adaptable to the revised
syntax as well as to the standard syntax. This is not a mere feature, it is
an important architectural design decision. This way beginners may learn the
revised syntax, while experienced users may keep the syntax they are familiar 
with.
Gérard Huet


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Re: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[Benjamin C. Pierce]

> > Are there any programming environments out there for OCaml that are
> > especially well suited to beginning programmers?
> 
> how about ocamlbrowser?

I'd wondered about this too.  Does anybody have actual experience with
using OCamlBrowser as an IDE for teaching?  (From playing around with it
for a few minutes, my sense is that it is "not quite there yet" for this
purpose, but perhaps it would not be that hard to get it there...)

     B


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Re: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[Benjamin C. Pierce]

> About this subject, I would like to make a public Request for Features, in
> order to gather many opinions and tips about that IDE . ( which will be at
> the same time for beginners AND for experienced people ).

My own main request for a beginner IDE is that it be (or have a switch
that makes it) _absolutely_ as simple as possible.  It should provide a
few standard cursor movement and editing keybindings, standard
mouse-based selection, standard "Open" and "Save as" dialogs, a way of
taking the editing buffer and running it through OCaml, and ideally an
OCaml top level for direct interaction.  Maybe a documentation browser.
Nothing else.

At another level of ambition, an extremely useful feature would be the
ability to accept only a subset of OCaml -- e.g., requiring types of all
function parameters to be declared explicitly, providing only some simple
kinds of pattern matching, etc.  The DrScheme environment does a great
job with this.  

(Actually, the reason for wishing for language subsetting is not only to
prevent students from going outside of a small subset -- it also helps
prevent *professors* from accidentally generating examples that use more
of the language than they'd intended!)

     Benjamin

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Re: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[Jacques Garrigue]

From: "Benjamin C. Pierce" <bcpierce@saul.cis.upenn.edu>

> > > Are there any programming environments out there for OCaml that are
> > > especially well suited to beginning programmers?
> > 
> > how about ocamlbrowser?
> 
> I'd wondered about this too.  Does anybody have actual experience with
> using OCamlBrowser as an IDE for teaching?  (From playing around with it
> for a few minutes, my sense is that it is "not quite there yet" for this
> purpose, but perhaps it would not be that hard to get it there...)

The browsing capabilities are certainly useful for middle-beginners,
to get acquointed with the libraries.  I have often done it with
students here, and this works really well.

Use of the editor and the shell may be good for real beginners too,
but some improvements might help. You can already easily send a
function from the editor to the shell (Alt-X), but there is no
handling of shell errors. Yet, you can already typecheck stuff inside
the editor, so you can make sure you never send wrong code.
Type inspection should be a boon for beginners, but currently you get
no information when there is a type error, and this would be really
nice to have it.

More generally the behaviour of the editor and he shell have some
rough edges, which are hard to handle with Tk. This might be improved
by moving to GTK 2 (not GTK 1.2, the text widget is too weak).

As for working with subsets of the language, the answer, as always,
seems to be camlp4.  How easy is it to delete a rule from a grammar?

Cheers,

Jacques
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Re: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[Benjamin C. Pierce]

Thanks, Jacques,

> The browsing capabilities are certainly useful for middle-beginners,
> to get acquointed with the libraries.  I have often done it with
> students here, and this works really well.
> 
> Use of the editor and the shell may be good for real beginners too,
> but some improvements might help. You can already easily send a
> function from the editor to the shell (Alt-X), but there is no
> handling of shell errors. Yet, you can already typecheck stuff inside
> the editor, so you can make sure you never send wrong code.
> Type inspection should be a boon for beginners, but currently you get
> no information when there is a type error, and this would be really
> nice to have it.
> 
> More generally the behaviour of the editor and he shell have some
> rough edges, which are hard to handle with Tk. This might be improved
> by moving to GTK 2 (not GTK 1.2, the text widget is too weak).

>From playing with it for a few minutes myself, my impression was that a
good OCaml hacker could probably turn it into a decent (maybe not great)
beginner IDE with a couple of weeks of effort -- mainly just reorganizing
windows and menus and leaving the functionality pretty much the same.
But it sounds like this is not really worth putting much effort into
before lablgtk2.0 is ready.

> As for working with subsets of the language, the answer, as always,
> seems to be camlp4.  How easy is it to delete a rule from a grammar?

I had wondered about this, actually.  I know that the full OCaml grammar
is a somewhat complex beast -- e.g., there are lots of reduce/reduce
conflicts.  So (without having tried it, either via camlp4 or by hacking
the full compiler) I'm not confident that it would be very easy to
predict the consequences of deleting rules.

     Benjamin

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Re: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[Maxence Guesdon]

On Wed, 01 May 2002 12:09:43 EDT
"Benjamin C. Pierce" <bcpierce@saul.cis.upenn.edu> wrote:

> > About this subject, I would like to make a public Request for Features, in
> > order to gather many opinions and tips about that IDE . ( which will be at
> > the same time for beginners AND for experienced people ).
> 
> My own main request for a beginner IDE is that it be (or have a switch
> that makes it) _absolutely_ as simple as possible.  It should provide a
> few standard cursor movement and editing keybindings, standard
> mouse-based selection, standard "Open" and "Save as" dialogs, a way of
> taking the editing buffer and running it through OCaml, and ideally an
> OCaml top level for direct interaction.  Maybe a documentation browser.
> Nothing else.
When starting Cameleon i was told that emacs (or xemacs) would remain
THE editor. So i did not try to create another one and i chose to
inteface with them. But if you need a simple editor, interfacing
with toplevel, then one idea could be to take efuns (the simple
emacs clone developed by Fabrice Le Fessant) and add some
functionnalities to it. By making it a part of Cameleon, i think
the result could be what you're looking for. BTW, Cameleon includes a
doc browser which lets you access source code from the doc.

--
Maxence Guesdon
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RE: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[Paul Steckler]

Yes, Matthew Flatt and David Goldberg are actively working on a DrOcaml,
which would work within the current DrScheme environment.   As a proof
of concept for this approach, there's a primitive Algol60 environment
for the working version of DrScheme.  

As Benjamin points out, it's a lot of work ...

-- Paul

> -----Original Message-----
> > On another note, last time I talked to Matthias, Shriram, and/or
> > Matthew,  they were talking about putting a "DrML" environment
> > together.  I'm not sure whether they were shooting for an SML
> > or Ocaml environment.
> 
> Yes, we're in contact with the DrScheme folks, and they (with some
> help/kibitzing from us at Penn) are definitely working on a DrML
> environment -- probably for just a "teaching subset" of OCaml.
> 
> Actually, the motivation for my question on this list a couple of days
> ago was to check what the fallback alternatives would be in case DrML
> is
> not ready for teaching in the fall...
> 
> > And of course, this all needs to be modifiable for an instructor
> > so that they can turn on/off features in language levels.
> 
> Unfortunately, this very wonderful aspect of the DrScheme environment
> seems to have involved quite a lot of work and special hand-crafting.
> It's not clear that it can be replicated for other languages with a
> reasonable amount of work.
> 
>      Benjamin

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Re: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[Henrik Motakef]

roberto@dicosmo.org writes:

> Back in the early CamlLight/NextStep days, Jerome Vouillon wrote a
> truly wondrous CamlLight.app
> [...]
> The code is still around, but NextStep is no longer there to run it :-(

Maybe GNUStep (http://www.gnustep.org) could help here? 

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Re: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[roberto]

Back in the early CamlLight/NextStep days, Jerome Vouillon wrote a
truly wondrous CamlLight.app that allowed a very simple interaction
loop, plus an extremely nice display of (recursive) data-structures
with the possibility of collapsing/uncollapsing parts of the structure.

The code is still around, but NextStep is no longer there to run it :-(

It would be nice to keep at least the idea of the data displayer in the
pipeline for future IDEs...

--Roberto Di Cosmo
 
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Re: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[Benjamin C. Pierce]

> On another note, last time I talked to Matthias, Shriram, and/or
> Matthew,  they were talking about putting a "DrML" environment 
> together.  I'm not sure whether they were shooting for an SML
> or Ocaml environment.  

Yes, we're in contact with the DrScheme folks, and they (with some
help/kibitzing from us at Penn) are definitely working on a DrML
environment -- probably for just a "teaching subset" of OCaml.

Actually, the motivation for my question on this list a couple of days
ago was to check what the fallback alternatives would be in case DrML is
not ready for teaching in the fall...

> And of course, this all needs to be modifiable for an instructor
> so that they can turn on/off features in language levels.  

Unfortunately, this very wonderful aspect of the DrScheme environment
seems to have involved quite a lot of work and special hand-crafting.
It's not clear that it can be replicated for other languages with a
reasonable amount of work.

     Benjamin

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RE: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[Gregory Morrisett]

On another note, last time I talked to Matthias, Shriram, and/or
Matthew,  they were talking about putting a "DrML" environment 
together.  I'm not sure whether they were shooting for an SML
or Ocaml environment.  

I actually think there's a lot more to putting together a good 
teaching IDE together (like DrScheme) than what people currently
have or could easily cobble together.  For instance, an integrated
algebraic stepper (for at least the functional subset of the language)
is really a nice thing to have.  Similarly, it would be nice
to have an environment browser which allows you to look through
the top-level environment to search for library bindings, see
module signatures, etc.  

Another thing that would be really nice is to have incremental
type checking integrated with the editor so that, for instance,
you could mouse over an identifier or expression and get its type.
And of course, any improvement in type error messages as well
as parse errors.  The latter is really problematic with Ocaml's
syntax (old or revised).  

It might also be nice to have a pretty-printer which can put
code into a somewhat canonical style.  For instance, I require
students to put types on top-level definitions and have certain
layout requirements.  It would be nice if there were a layout
checker.

And of course, this all needs to be modifiable for an instructor
so that they can turn on/off features in language levels.  

-Greg
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RE: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

[Gregory Morrisett]

> I'm not confident that it would be very easy to
> predict the consequences of deleting rules.

So why not leave the rules in but generate an error in the semantic
actions?

-Greg

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