From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Original-To: caml-list@sympa.inria.fr Delivered-To: caml-list@sympa.inria.fr Received: from mail2-relais-roc.national.inria.fr (mail2-relais-roc.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.83]) by sympa.inria.fr (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 87C137FB0A for ; Tue, 25 Nov 2014 17:03:09 +0100 (CET) X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="5.07,456,1413237600"; d="scan'208";a="109512021" Received: from sympa.inria.fr ([193.51.193.213]) by mail2-relais-roc.national.inria.fr with ESMTP; 25 Nov 2014 17:03:09 +0100 Received: by sympa.inria.fr (Postfix, from userid 20132) id 7C3E57FB0B; Tue, 25 Nov 2014 17:03:09 +0100 (CET) Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 17:03:04 +0100 To: caml-list@inria.fr Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT From: X-Mailer: Sympa 6.1.17 Subject: [Caml-list] teaching OCaml Greetings. Bob Muller here, in the CS dept. at Boston College. I've set out to develop an intro CS course in ML that I hope will be well-suited for similar universities in the US. My original plan was to teach the course in SML but after talking with a few people at neighboring schools, I switched to OCaml. I am now in the final weeks of the first run of the course. I plan to document my experience more fully at some point but I wanted to touch base with the OCaml community because I'm teaching the course again in the spring and I am leaning toward switching to F#. While OCaml has in many respects been great and it's easy to see that my students find the OCaml style of coding very compelling, there are significant problems. Of course, OCaml wasn't designed for teaching but I'm hoping that someone on this list might be able to advise me about solutions to some of these that I just don't know about. 1. Error messages: It's difficult to give good type errors for ML but I was hoping that the state-of-the-art of type error reporting had improved. When my students receive a type error, they are utterly mystified, 2. GUIs: several of my problem sets work with simple graphics (e.g., rendering tessellations) or animations (e.g., a maze walk or a simplified form of tetris, or the game "Flow"). We have been hobbling along with the Graphics and Labltk modules for this but it has been more pain than my students ought to know. We also have some problem sets that work with audio so I would like support for that. Any thoughts, ideas and/or leads on either of these would be much appreciated. I already plan to look at js_of_ocaml more closely. Thank you, Bob Muller