undefined | Better HN

0 pointssweeneyrod5y ago0 comments

I think you are definitely pointing at something that has been a weakness of OCaml for a long time (but as you say is happily changing). But I wouldn't characterise it as elitism; IME the OCaml community is very friendly.

Instead, I think it comes from the fact that when it was first developed in the 90s, it was viewed in the context of C (and this attitude has carried over somewhat to the modern day where it makes much less sense). For example, building non-trivial projects with just the compiler is very painful from most modern perspectives, but it's very similar to what you have to do for C.

0 comments

2 comments · 1 top-level

pdimitar5y ago· 1 in thread

Thank you for the constructive comment. ^_^

What you say is fair. It seems that OCaml's niche with time moved from competing with C to competing with Haskell and Rust -- at least from where I am standing. Maybe some members of the community aren't OK with that goalpost moving. That would be understandable.

But to be fair, I like OCaml more than Rust but I got very spoiled by both Elixir's and Rust's tooling -- both are excellent enablers of productivity.

Once OCaml overcomes this barrier (and introduces multicore) I am definitely going in, neck deep! :)

sweeneyrodOP5y ago

Yes, I think everyone would agree that OCaml has gone from competing with the predominant high-level language of 1996 (C) to the predominant languages of today (definitely not C).

Another factor is that creating a language (Rust, Go etc.) from scratch lets you have nice unified tooling to an extent that is probably just not possible with languages with baggage. So I doubt OCaml will ever manage to be quite as seamless as those, but IMO it's already gone from significantly worse tooling than e.g. Python/Java to significantly better, and is still improving all the time!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse