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> I feel inferior for not being fluent in OCaml I learned OCaml recently, on my own, for myself. It’s actually a pretty easily language to use and learn, but h

> I feel inferior for not being fluent in OCaml I learned OCaml recently, on my own, for myself. It’s actually a pretty easily language to use and learn, but historically there weren’t EXCELLENT resources for learning it. There are now excellent resources, predominantly: https://cs3110.github.io/textbook/cover.html https://cs3110.github.io/textbook/cover.html When OCaml 5 settles, its general applicability will be (imho) much larger. Do I recommend it for everything? No. But you wont hit segfaults like you will in go, and you certainly wont wrastle the compiler like you will rust. Haskell and OCamls lack of fluent programming make them less easy to program in (read: slower iteration), if you get your design right, your final product is just a real treat :chefs_kiss:. Some newer fp langs do have fluent style syntaxes, which are The ocaml debugging experience stinks, and the lack of builtin (de)serializers for custom/composite types is very obnoxious, to put it kindly. Still, it’s not the obscure thing everyone loves to say about it. Really, its not. These jokers in this thread “oh rust isnt hard! Ohhh they probably didnt try much.” Respectfully, get outta here. I love rust. Taken the doubly linked list tutorial? How about needed to use anything with Pin? Rust requires a huge surface area of foundational knowledge to be productive, full stop—the author is absolutely within his right to make this very fair claim about rust being onerous, relative to his candidate pool

nu11ptr 4y ago
OCaml is great. One of my favorite languages. I think the only thing hard about it is the fact that it is solidly FP, and that is not a familiar paradigm to many. One of these days I want to check out F# so I can use the whole .NET set of libs as well (the only bad thing about ocaml is the small ecosystem of libs). > These jokers in this thread “oh rust isnt hard! Ohhh they probably didnt try much.” Respectfully, get outta here. I love rust. Taken the doubly linked list tutorial? How about needed to use anything with Pin? Rust requires a huge surface area of foundational knowledge to be productive, full stop—the author is absolutely within his right to make this very fair claim about rust being onerous, relative to his candidate pool Rust is not an easy language, but I find it strange that people take the hardest parts and act like it is most of what it is about (I can count on one hand how many times I've had to directly interact with Pin). The things you mention aren't things I spend any time on, and I write Rust nearly 12 hours a day. P.S. - Is there actually a double linked list tutorial? What an _awful_ way to learn Rust. That is like starting at the very end of what you should be learning and then working forward. No wonder it scared people away.
- mumblemumble 4y ago
  The doubly linked list thing strikes me as more of an illustration of cultural differences between C programmers an the rest of the world than as a straightforward criticism of Rust. I've no doubt that doubly linked lists are an awkward hassle to implement in Rust. But the same is true in functional languages, and you never hear people criticizing, e.g., Haskell over this. I have a couple guesses as to why that is, but I'm guessing the main one is that Rust being touted as a C replacement results in people assuming that Rust should be amenable to the same kind of (for lack of a better way to put it) hyper-imperative approach to problem solving that C basically forces upon people. But I'm also pretty sure that I've never, in my 30 years of programming, used a doubly linked list in anger in a language that wasn't C. (Maybe Pascal?) I have never used Rust in anger, either, but, based on my little bit of dabbling, it seems like yet another language where I would be likely to choose any number of different data structures first. I certainly wouldn't be implementing my own in any case. These days, implementing doubly linked lists from scratch seems to be very nearly the sole province of C programmers and undergraduates.
  - moldavi 4y ago
    It's not just doubly linked lists. They're just a basic example of borrow checking not being able to handle a lot of easy patterns that are perfectly safe in other languages.
    - cropcirclbureau 4y ago
      Perfectly safe at the expense of a garbage collector. You can still do pointer soup and int handle based lists as you can do in any other low-level language with the same caveats. Rust is punching up from the manual memory management, zero-cost abstraction plane and competing with the garbage collected langs. It's still at it's core a tool for writing low level code.
      - moldavi 4y ago
        GP was confused about why the doubly linked list case was so important, so I enlightened, it's an example of an entire class of the borrow checker's problems. Your response isn't really relevant in that context, and instead escalates to a much larger debate, so best I not engage. Appreciate the thought though =)
TylerE 4y ago
Ocaml is a (mostly) good to great language with horrible tooling that completely kills any desire I have to work with it.

nu11ptr 4y ago

OCaml is great. One of my favorite languages. I think the only thing hard about it is the fact that it is solidly FP, and that is not a familiar paradigm to many. One of these days I want to check out F# so I can use the whole .NET set of libs as well (the only bad thing about ocaml is the small ecosystem of libs). > These jokers in this thread “oh rust isnt hard! Ohhh they probably didnt try much.” Respectfully, get outta here. I love rust. Taken the doubly linked list tutorial? How about needed to use anything with Pin? Rust requires a huge surface area of foundational knowledge to be productive, full stop—the author is absolutely within his right to make this very fair claim about rust being onerous, relative to his candidate pool Rust is not an easy language, but I find it strange that people take the hardest parts and act like it is most of what it is about (I can count on one hand how many times I've had to directly interact with Pin). The things you mention aren't things I spend any time on, and I write Rust nearly 12 hours a day. P.S. - Is there actually a double linked list tutorial? What an _awful_ way to learn Rust. That is like starting at the very end of what you should be learning and then working forward. No wonder it scared people away.

mumblemumble 4y ago
The doubly linked list thing strikes me as more of an illustration of cultural differences between C programmers an the rest of the world than as a straightforward criticism of Rust. I've no doubt that doubly linked lists are an awkward hassle to implement in Rust. But the same is true in functional languages, and you never hear people criticizing, e.g., Haskell over this. I have a couple guesses as to why that is, but I'm guessing the main one is that Rust being touted as a C replacement results in people assuming that Rust should be amenable to the same kind of (for lack of a better way to put it) hyper-imperative approach to problem solving that C basically forces upon people. But I'm also pretty sure that I've never, in my 30 years of programming, used a doubly linked list in anger in a language that wasn't C. (Maybe Pascal?) I have never used Rust in anger, either, but, based on my little bit of dabbling, it seems like yet another language where I would be likely to choose any number of different data structures first. I certainly wouldn't be implementing my own in any case. These days, implementing doubly linked lists from scratch seems to be very nearly the sole province of C programmers and undergraduates.
- moldavi 4y ago
  It's not just doubly linked lists. They're just a basic example of borrow checking not being able to handle a lot of easy patterns that are perfectly safe in other languages.
  - cropcirclbureau 4y ago
    Perfectly safe at the expense of a garbage collector. You can still do pointer soup and int handle based lists as you can do in any other low-level language with the same caveats. Rust is punching up from the manual memory management, zero-cost abstraction plane and competing with the garbage collected langs. It's still at it's core a tool for writing low level code.
    - moldavi 4y ago
      GP was confused about why the doubly linked list case was so important, so I enlightened, it's an example of an entire class of the borrow checker's problems. Your response isn't really relevant in that context, and instead escalates to a much larger debate, so best I not engage. Appreciate the thought though =)

TylerE 4y ago

Ocaml is a (mostly) good to great language with horrible tooling that completely kills any desire I have to work with it.