Re: [Caml-list] What if exn was not an open type?

[Malcolm Matalka <mmatalka@gmail.com>]

"Richard W.M. Jones" <rich@annexia.org> writes:

> On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 11:12:26AM +0200, Philippe Veber wrote:
>> isn't that a context where error monads do a pretty decent job?
>> 
>> check_some_problem () >>= fun () ->
>> check_some_other_problem () >>= fun () ->
>> expect_something () >>= fun something ->
>> finally_do something
>
> Right, but the main problem with monads is they scare off ordinary
> programmers :-/

F# seems to have limited support for monads, but they call them
"workflows" and "computation statements" (or something like that).
Maybe just a name change would be sufficient for Ocaml folks.  We can
tell everyone it's just monads still, but we want to call them blah.  I
dunno, how effective that is.

>
> When writing open source code in OCaml we have two -- conflicting --
> goals.  Goal #1 is to write elegant, short, fast, safe code, and OCaml
> really wins there.  Goal #2 is to attract outside programmers to work
> on the project, and that's pretty hard with OCaml code, but we manage
> it.  But it gets much much harder if we use any concept which strays
> too far from imperative/C-like code.  You will see if you look through
> our codebase that it's pretty imperative and -- quite deliberately --
> avoids doing strange stuff with modules, functors or really anything
> which is "excessively functional" (sorry for the loose term, but I
> hope you know what I mean :-).
>
> However when I have the time after my current conference I will try
> to rewrite the code I linked to with monads to see if I can make
> something which is both simple and readable.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Rich.