Using, Understanding, and Unraveling the OCaml Language

Re:Using, Understanding, and Unraveling the OCaml Language by smabie on Tuesday August 18, 2020 @12:26AM (#24195261)

This is so old, I personally wouldn't read it. If you want to learn Ocaml, probably the best current resource is Real World Ocaml v2: https://dev.realworldocaml.org/. It doesn't have good coverage of the not so real world things or the myriad of syntax extensions (mostly from Jane Street). The main auther is one of the original co-founders of Jane Street as well. The only reason I'm saying this is that the Jane Streets guys steer the direction of the language heavily, and their needs don't necessarily fit mine. Their standard library alternative Core (which RWO uses) is a ton of code, pulling in hundreds of dependencies. This leads to a native compiled hello world binary being over 20mb.

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Re:Using, Understanding, and Unraveling the OCaml Language by svvcfb1212 on Tuesday August 18, 2020 @03:37AM (#24196143)

That’s not entirely fair. While it is true that it doesn’t cover the latest and greatest package management tools or libraries, it does have a nice coverage of the core language that is still perfectly valid. It is written for a different target audience than RWO I think - when it was written, most of the people who used Ocaml were PL developers and researchers, so it focuses on the language from that perspective.

I wouldn’t disregard it simply due to its age - that is a bad habit I see all too often (“Old = bad!”). Just to make sure before posting this, I went to some random parts of the book and pasted example code into a utop REPL for the latest Ocaml version and it worked fine. So it’s not like the code has bit rotted. It’s still worth a read if someone is interested in languages. It is not worth reading if you are looking for a tutorial on spinning up some form of web app or server app that uses all the shiny things people are currently excited about.

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Re:Using, Understanding, and Unraveling the OCaml Language by yawaramin on Tuesday August 18, 2020 @01:04AM (#24195456)

Do you mean Yaron Minsky? I don't think he was a co-founder of Jane Street. From what he's said publicly I got the impression that he was a hire (who obviously had a huge impact).

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Re:Using, Understanding, and Unraveling the OCaml Language by vphantom on Tuesday August 18, 2020 @08:45AM (#24197945)

I don't think he's a co-founder but he is the one who brought OCaml into that company. Started out as a means to do some quick demos and ended up being their language of choice.

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Re:Using, Understanding, and Unraveling the OCaml Language by smabie on Tuesday August 18, 2020 @02:10AM (#24195769)

Yeah, it seems your right.

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Re:Using, Understanding, and Unraveling the OCaml Language by GeorgeWBasic on Tuesday August 18, 2020 @04:20AM (#24196367)

That isn't strictly true of the latest version of Real World Ocaml. Most of the examples in the book use Base instead of Core, which is a lot more lightweight.

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