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I'm interested you think the Haskell community is bigger than the OCaml one. Without checking any sources, I would have assumed the OCaml has a larger community

I'm interested you think the Haskell community is bigger than the OCaml one. Without checking any sources, I would have assumed the OCaml has a larger community of people using it in production for a variety of things, and therefore would have have the libraries etc. for me to build my thing. I suppose this is my bias - the only community I care about is the engineering side as supposed to my academic side. Also look at ReasonML (and bucklescript). I have tinkered with it for Web front end and been very impressed.

philzook 7y ago
I haven't figured out where on the internet OCaml people live. Maybe they have better things to do with their lives than proselytizing. There is very clear bias in my opinions and information. Jane Street is a very prominent industrial user for which I can't really think of a Haskell equivalent of that company size. ReasonML is a nicer syntax. Kind of seemed like if you wanna do ReasonML you need to know both OCaml and ReasonML though on a cursory glance.
- bgorman 7y ago
  In my opinion the worst thing about the Ocaml/ReasonML platform is that discovery of language features/syntax/functions is needlessly difficult. There is no Hoogle equivalent for OCaml. Module functors are powerful, but the type system is very strict so it can be frustrating trying to express what you want. There are some techniques that are rarely covered by books and are almost impossible to google for. By contract, I think Haskell's typeclasses gives useful guard-rails to composing "complicated" logic. Overall, as someone who has been programming full-time in ReasonML for 9 months now, there are too many times places where I still feel like a "prisoner" of the type system for me to advocate for it over Clojure. I need to do more projects with Haskell, I am hopeful the built in typeclasses can reduce the time I am "stuck".
- ernst_klim 7y ago
  >I haven't figured out where on the internet OCaml people live. https://discuss.ocaml.org/ https://discuss.ocaml.org/ As well as #ocaml on freenode and r/ocaml on reddit.
ernst_klim 7y ago
> I would have assumed the OCaml has a larger community of people using it in production Yes, I also feel that Haskell has a larger community among academia/bloggers, but much lesser community among actual industrial users. There are dozens of professional high quality OCaml software used by industry: Facebook's linters, Xen stack, Coq, Frama-C, Boeing's static analizer, FFTW, libguestfs by RedHat, camlpdf, Liquid Soap etc. With Haskell, it feels like there are significantly less industrial grade projects written in it.

philzook 7y ago

I haven't figured out where on the internet OCaml people live. Maybe they have better things to do with their lives than proselytizing. There is very clear bias in my opinions and information. Jane Street is a very prominent industrial user for which I can't really think of a Haskell equivalent of that company size. ReasonML is a nicer syntax. Kind of seemed like if you wanna do ReasonML you need to know both OCaml and ReasonML though on a cursory glance.

bgorman 7y ago
In my opinion the worst thing about the Ocaml/ReasonML platform is that discovery of language features/syntax/functions is needlessly difficult. There is no Hoogle equivalent for OCaml. Module functors are powerful, but the type system is very strict so it can be frustrating trying to express what you want. There are some techniques that are rarely covered by books and are almost impossible to google for. By contract, I think Haskell's typeclasses gives useful guard-rails to composing "complicated" logic. Overall, as someone who has been programming full-time in ReasonML for 9 months now, there are too many times places where I still feel like a "prisoner" of the type system for me to advocate for it over Clojure. I need to do more projects with Haskell, I am hopeful the built in typeclasses can reduce the time I am "stuck".
ernst_klim 7y ago
>I haven't figured out where on the internet OCaml people live. https://discuss.ocaml.org/ https://discuss.ocaml.org/ As well as #ocaml on freenode and r/ocaml on reddit.

ernst_klim 7y ago

> I would have assumed the OCaml has a larger community of people using it in production Yes, I also feel that Haskell has a larger community among academia/bloggers, but much lesser community among actual industrial users. There are dozens of professional high quality OCaml software used by industry: Facebook's linters, Xen stack, Coq, Frama-C, Boeing's static analizer, FFTW, libguestfs by RedHat, camlpdf, Liquid Soap etc. With Haskell, it feels like there are significantly less industrial grade projects written in it.