Re: [Caml-list] A student feedback on OCaml

[Gary Trakhman <gary.trakhman@gmail.com>]

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Having used OCaml as a professional but not an enthusiast (I have a
clojure-depth), I am not polarized but ambivolent three months in of daily
use.  I enjoy the type system and life inside the bounds of a shared
codebase, but I'm finding a lot of the edge-system-integration (lack of 3rd
party libs) adding up.  Our company (Arena) fills in many of the gaps with
python due to its relevance as a data-science language and our problem
space, but I still think keeping everything in a JVM single process
monolith (like I have in my past) saves a lot of process-churn and
overhead.  Shelling out for _anything_ breaks abstraction boundaries and
requires complexity around build systems, etc., and we find ourselves doing
it for things like making SOAP calls, parsing XLS files, etc.  All these
prevent me from spending more time writing OCaml code.  Things like shared
infrastructure, plentiful libraries, a fast shared GC in something like the
JVM or CLR (or python or JS VM) can affect productivity more than the
language design itself.

Saying a language is 'better' depends on your use-cases, team-scale factors
and tradeoffs.  I myself can be very productive in a dynamic language, but
I'm becoming convinced that a type-system can really matter in larger
codebases, larger teams, or bitrot-prevention in code that is rarely
touched and out of mind.

Anyway, I provide these 2-cents because I think there are few people that
come to work in OCaml (or any functional language) by happen-stance and it
might be valuable feedback to someone.  Being really excited about a
language makes it easier to gloss over shortcomings.

On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 12:49 PM Michael C Vanier <mvanier@cms.caltech.edu>
wrote:

> It's a cute drawing.  It's hard to know more without any context.  I
> teach both Python and OCaml to undergraduates, but the students have to
> learn Python first (to get a firm grasp on basic programming).  My
> experience with OCaml (which I vastly prefer to Python) is that it's
> polarizing.  Some students absolutely love it, but others struggle with
> the language and have a hard time getting their programs to compile even
> after weeks of effort. Such students are obviously going to prefer other
> languages.
>
> Mike
>
>
> On 7/25/17 4:35 PM, Christophe Raffalli wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > Here is a student feedback:
> >
> > https://lama.univ-savoie.fr/~raffalli/pics/caml-versus-python.png
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Christophe
>
>
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