Re:The struggle with Rust
by pmoriarty on Tuesday January 24, 2017 @12:30PM
(#13473452)
I never got past the pain-in-the-ass stage of dealing with the OCaml compiler. I hated wrestling with it for something simple. It really slowed me down to no end.
I remember asking on freenode's #ocaml for help with a convoluted error message, and when I was told what it meant and how to fix it, I asked how the person who helped me knew what it meant. He told me he'd taken two semesters of type theory courses at uni. Having to spend a year taking university-level courses in order to effectively program in OCaml seemed like way too much pain for too little gain when there were so many other less painful languages to program in.
Later I discovered Lisp and then Scheme. Both were a sheer joy to use compared to OCaml. I didn't have to wrestle with the type checker, my programs were quick and easy to write and understand, and in their own way the languages were just as powerful as OCaml was. Sure, OCaml had them beat at safety (at least if you were comparing ordinary Lisps and Schemes, not statically typed versions or extensions with more safety features) but it way, way more painful and slow to program in, for me. I recognize that if you need the safety, then the pain might be worth it. But even then it might be worthwhile to program in a dynamic language like Lisp/Scheme and then once the program matures, rewrite it in a safe language like OCaml. But even then, I think I'd just rather dial up the safety features of Lisp/Scheme or use one of the static versions.
That's just me. I know some people love OCaml. And I'm sure I'm missing some of its wonders that are only apparent when you dive deep enough in to the language. But from what I did learn of it, it just wasn't for me.
Re:The struggle with Rust
by sfilargi on Tuesday January 24, 2017 @02:57PM
(#13474886)
What helped me when starting with OCaml is always declaring the types in the function's arguments. The compiler errors started making a lot more sense.
I remember asking on freenode's #ocaml for help with a convoluted error message, and when I was told what it meant and how to fix it, I asked how the person who helped me knew what it meant. He told me he'd taken two semesters of type theory courses at uni. Having to spend a year taking university-level courses in order to effectively program in OCaml seemed like way too much pain for too little gain when there were so many other less painful languages to program in.
Later I discovered Lisp and then Scheme. Both were a sheer joy to use compared to OCaml. I didn't have to wrestle with the type checker, my programs were quick and easy to write and understand, and in their own way the languages were just as powerful as OCaml was. Sure, OCaml had them beat at safety (at least if you were comparing ordinary Lisps and Schemes, not statically typed versions or extensions with more safety features) but it way, way more painful and slow to program in, for me. I recognize that if you need the safety, then the pain might be worth it. But even then it might be worthwhile to program in a dynamic language like Lisp/Scheme and then once the program matures, rewrite it in a safe language like OCaml. But even then, I think I'd just rather dial up the safety features of Lisp/Scheme or use one of the static versions.
That's just me. I know some people love OCaml. And I'm sure I'm missing some of its wonders that are only apparent when you dive deep enough in to the language. But from what I did learn of it, it just wasn't for me.