4 ms·

I'm sort of sick of hearing that OCaml has crappy or crufty syntax. I like OCaml's syntax. There is just a sea of useless algol brackets in so many languages. I

by agentgt 10y ago

I'm sort of sick of hearing that OCaml has crappy or crufty syntax. I like OCaml's syntax. There is just a sea of useless algol brackets in so many languages. I was sort of sad that Rust fell victim to the damn bracket. At times I don't even think Scala is that much more succinct than modern Java 8 (ala bracket indentation fun). I remember years ago (15 years.. jesus I'm old) discovering OCaml and I couldn't believe how terse the language was for producing native code. If anything I don't like about OCaml syntax is that it actually has an enormous amount of syntactic sugar.

qbrass 10y ago
Was OCaml was your first ML language? It seems that most of the people who find OCaml crufty used Standard ML before OCaml.
- eatonphil 10y ago
  For what it's worth, I think OCaml's syntax is one of its weakest points (not to mention syntax extensions...) and I have been writing OCaml 3 years longer than I've been writing Standard ML.
  - agentgt 10y ago
    Well yes I agree if you compare OCaml to Standard ML its syntax is not as good and I do prefer Standard ML over it. However I prefer OCaml over Java, Javascript, Scala (and the bazillion other brace block languages that are the same), and yes even Haskell.
- agentgt 10y ago
  Guilty as charged.. I did learn OCaml first and from that official green HTML documentation which still appears to be green after 16 years :). My complaint with OCaml was OCamlp and the tedium of creating modules and functors. While AdHoc poly (aka type classes) is not as flexible it is IMO easier to understand, generally less verbose and slightly more elegant than OCaml modules. I'm glad they added first class modules as I recall wanting something like that a long time ago.