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I moved directly from Python to OCaml and I have to say, I’ve never been happier. Special shout outs to Jane Street, as their open source software is really sol

I moved directly from Python to OCaml and I have to say, I’ve never been happier. Special shout outs to Jane Street, as their open source software is really solid and a pleasure to use. The community is small but really smart. Overall I think F# and OCaml really nailed the programming language design sweet spot of powerful and practical.

grdvnl 8y ago
Can you eloborate on what kind of projects you work on which has made the move easy from Python to OCaml. While I love OCaml I have not heard positive things about the library eco-system in terms of variety and maintenance. Perhaps, you could throw some light on that based on your experience, especially after giving up the eco-system Python provides you. This is a sincere question and would love to find good excuses to adopt OCaml as my primary language of choice.
- ernst_klim 8y ago
  >I have not heard positive things about the library eco-system OCaml has quite a neat ecosystem, though. Especially in terms of quality. There are a few major and a bulk of minor groups that write libraries for different purposes, such as: * MirageOS -- people behind a bunch of a high quality system libraries, there are tls (in pure ocaml) and various cryptography primitives, filesystem drivers, tar, zlib, full tcpip stack, http server, git (in pure ocaml, not a mere binding), irmin (a git-based key-store database with concurrent access), dns and some other [1]. * Ocsigen -- webdevs, authors of Lwt (monadic concurrency library), js_of_ocaml (ocaml to js compiler) and related stuff [2] * Jane Street, Facebook, blumberg -- reason syntax, bucklescript (alternative npm-ecosystem-frienly javascript compiler), various libraries for serialization, containers etc. * Others Opam [3] has quite a comprehensive set of libraries pretty for every purpose: data serialization, interaction with other langs (python, R, beam Erlang/Elixir), servers, db bindings, stuff for system or web programming. Some stuff is absent, but it's definitely not a scorched field, and most of the time the benefits worth writing an absent binding or two. [1] https://github.com/mirage https://github.com/mirage [2] https://github.com/ocsigen https://github.com/ocsigen [3] https://opam.ocaml.org/packages/index-popularity.html https://opam.ocaml.org/packages/index-popularity.html

grdvnl 8y ago

Can you eloborate on what kind of projects you work on which has made the move easy from Python to OCaml. While I love OCaml I have not heard positive things about the library eco-system in terms of variety and maintenance. Perhaps, you could throw some light on that based on your experience, especially after giving up the eco-system Python provides you. This is a sincere question and would love to find good excuses to adopt OCaml as my primary language of choice.

ernst_klim 8y ago
>I have not heard positive things about the library eco-system OCaml has quite a neat ecosystem, though. Especially in terms of quality. There are a few major and a bulk of minor groups that write libraries for different purposes, such as: * MirageOS -- people behind a bunch of a high quality system libraries, there are tls (in pure ocaml) and various cryptography primitives, filesystem drivers, tar, zlib, full tcpip stack, http server, git (in pure ocaml, not a mere binding), irmin (a git-based key-store database with concurrent access), dns and some other [1]. * Ocsigen -- webdevs, authors of Lwt (monadic concurrency library), js_of_ocaml (ocaml to js compiler) and related stuff [2] * Jane Street, Facebook, blumberg -- reason syntax, bucklescript (alternative npm-ecosystem-frienly javascript compiler), various libraries for serialization, containers etc. * Others Opam [3] has quite a comprehensive set of libraries pretty for every purpose: data serialization, interaction with other langs (python, R, beam Erlang/Elixir), servers, db bindings, stuff for system or web programming. Some stuff is absent, but it's definitely not a scorched field, and most of the time the benefits worth writing an absent binding or two. [1] https://github.com/mirage https://github.com/mirage [2] https://github.com/ocsigen https://github.com/ocsigen [3] https://opam.ocaml.org/packages/index-popularity.html https://opam.ocaml.org/packages/index-popularity.html