Apologies for igniting a bit of a syntax flame war; it wasn't my intention. The Reason project is fantastic and I hope it's successful. I'm concerned with teaching OCaml (or possibly Reason) not to JS programmers but to first-year university students and to students being introduced to algebra. (In the US, that means middle-school and high-school). I hope that to the greatest extent possible, the use of parentheses in Reason will be consistent with their most common use in algebra -- for grouping. OCaml isn't perfect on this score but the n-argument function accepting an n-tuple seems like the right thing. I'm hoping that I won't have to explain to students things like let add(m, n) = m + n add(5) or let add((m, n)) = m + n I feel that many of the Reason syntax diffs with OCaml are improvements but this sort of thing is a step backward IMHO that won't be helpful to JS programmers anyway. Bob Muller On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 12:10 PM, Yotam Barnoy wrote: > Rust ditched its syntax before release in favor of a syntax more > geared towards the kind of programmers they wanted to attract. This > wasn't a bad decision. > > Many people on this mailing list seem to be unaware of the fact that > Reason is really catching on. It's simply a human reality that we like > to try things that are close to what we already know. Bringing OCaml's > syntax close to a language like Javascript, which has countless > developers nowadays, means that a much higher percentage of those > people will want to try out OCaml/Reason. And ultimately, a language > is only as good as its ecosystem -- having the best-designed language > in the world is meaningless if only a few people are using it. > > I'm not one of those people who enjoys Reason's syntax (aside from the > issues they fixed in OCaml's syntax), but I appreciate what the Reason > people have done, and I expect Reason to soon eclipse OCaml in terms > of number of users. I don't see this as a bad thing -- Reason's > creators seem to really love OCaml and want to contribute back to the > community. > > On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 11:47 AM, Viet Le wrote: > > Yawar, crediting the popularity of Rust because of syntax is misleading. > > Mozilla has marketing budget and people behind Rust have build very > active > > community with weekly newsletter and know how to market. OCaml is mostly > > used by academia and some industry players, and marketing is not being > > emphasized. > > > > ReasonML is not gaining because of syntax, it's because of huge marketing > > effort and easy to follow tutorials and examples and catchy websites. > OCaml > > documentation is as plain as plain can get. Rust has a few catchy > websites, > > tutorials and free books as well. > > > > Viet. > > > > On 11 December 2017 at 16:10, Ian Zimmerman > wrote: > >> > >> On 2017-12-11 15:40, Gerd Stolpmann wrote: > >> > >> > although, with currified functions this is only an illusion > >> > >> As they say, "this". The alternative syntax will lead to people never > >> learning about partial application. > >> > >> Does your own language curry multiple arguments by default like Ocaml > >> does? If yes, then (IMO) your choice is a mistake, in spite of the > >> (good) arguments you give for it. > >> > >> I would be more tolerant about such syntax in a SML-like language where > >> multiple arguments are modelled with tuples in most cases. > >> > >> -- > >> Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet, > >> if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup. > >> To reply privately _only_ on Usenet, fetch the TXT record for the > domain. > >> > >> -- > >> Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management and archives: > >> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list > >> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners > >> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs > > > > > > > > > > -- > > Kind regards, > > Viet > > -- > Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management and archives: > https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list > Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners > Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs >