4 ms·

> Learn Programming with OCaml Lately, I keep asking myself, do I need to learn this new thing, should I force myself to learn this thing, LLMs know it anyways

> Learn Programming with OCaml Lately, I keep asking myself, do I need to learn this new thing, should I force myself to learn this thing, LLMs know it anyways and so on. So (asking genuinely), should we learn these things?

ivolimmen 29d ago
Keep using your brain or you will forget stuff. Doing puzzles is great, programming in new languages is also great.
adalacelove 29d ago
Should you learn history if it is already written in a book? Should you live if others are already living?
- a2ff6eeb0 29d ago
  For most people, history is trivia.
  - doc_ick 29d ago
    If you ignore history everything is perfect, or at least a controlled slight deviation.
xiaoyu2006 29d ago
You can also learn for your own amusement, and solely for the fun of comprehension; a lot of mathematician were driven by this. It's a shame current social value places so much utilitariaism on learning.
- f1shy 29d ago
  This. The question can be seen like “should I learn to solve sodoku, if a computer can do it better?”
- _HMCB_ 29d ago
  This ^
- underlipton 29d ago
  As always, it is good to be aware that many people are too anxious about more existential issues to comfortably an consistently expend effort on intellectually-taxing tasks that aren't perceived as directly related to their survival. If it's an issue with social values, it's less of one related to learning as it is to perpetuating artificial scarcity.
  - deleted 29d ago
    [deleted]
  - Barrin92 29d ago
    >to comfortably an consistently expend effort on intellectually-taxing tasks that aren't perceived as directly related to their survival. the average person spends 6(!) hours a day on their smartphone, the average TikTok user spends 100 minutes on the app alone. This isn't about artificial scarcity, it's about the average person looking like the Wall-E people
    - Avicebron 29d ago
      Escapism and making a concentrated effort on something are two different things. Yes it would probably be good if you could flip a switch and use the small windows of time we look at our phone per day to study OCaml, but it's not really realistic.. People who are asking these questions are saying "will me spending my time learning OCaml help me land that job that pays six figures and has health insurance so I can not rot away living on the margin". They aren't saying "I only do things that will make me money".
      - Barrin92 29d ago
        >use the small windows of time we look at our phone again, it's not a small window. It's six hours. That's almost half your waking day. People spend virtually their entire leisure time rotting away on low quality entertainment. >will me spending my time learning OCaml help me land that job that's a pointless question for one you never know if something will land you a job, new opportunities don't open up before you do something, secondly the relevant question is, should I stop doing X and start learning Ocaml, or Chinese, or take a welding class because all of that even if it doesn't work out beats scrolling through Instagram. I don't even take offense with the idea that you engage in activity that makes you money, because pure selfishness on that front would be an improvement to what most people are doing now.
- aaplok 29d ago
  I like baking. There are machines that can bake bread at an industrial scale that I cannot compete with. There are home kneaders that do much of the work very well. I use one of those more often than not. I still think it worth my time kneading dough by hand. It teaches me the various properties of flour, how external factors like humidity or temperature impact the overall process, and I believe that it makes me a better baker, even when I use a machine, because I am better at controlling what the machine does. When I get a new brand of flour I will make sure to bake everything by hand first to "get a feel". Kneading by hand is also very relaxing to me. This is probably the main reason I bake in the first place. Programming, and other activities are not very different. We now have machines that can do it faster, at a fraction of the quality many people deem good enough. If you hate coding, that is probably all you need to use, and learning a new language might just be a frustrating experience not worth subjecting yourself to. But if you enjoy coding then it should make you better at it, even when you use the machines.
dadoum 29d ago
My experience with OCaml has transformed how I think about programming and complex system design. This may also be true if you learn any other functional programming language, but OCaml is easy and flexible which makes it good imo as a door towards the more formal part of comp sci. Even for steering an LLM I think this might help.
- f1shy 29d ago
  My experience with lisp was exactly that: it completely changed how I think about programming, but much more, how I think about systems and engineering. (I learned it through SICP)
ahoka 29d ago
Why learn an instrument when you can just press play?
- a2ff6eeb0 29d ago
  Cultural inertia: until recently, you couldn't just press play and get even a wide selection of music: for most of history, if you wanted music, you had to make it or hire someone to do it for you. More recently, you had to go to the store and buy it, which meant you didn't have much variety. Today, learning an instrument is for social status, inheriting the shine of the past, where music was rare and costly. The reason to learn an instrument today is because the former situation was romanticized. It'll probably take a generation before people ease into guilt-free enjoying infinite, fully generated music.
  - toolslive 29d ago
    your body needs exercise or you end up an obese couch potato. Your mind is similar: it needs exercise or you end up a dunce.
    - deleted 29d ago
      [deleted]
  - jonahx 29d ago
    These theories sound vaguely plausible. I would rate them as about 5% true and 95% false, as explanation of the past and prediction of the future. The satisfaction of learning to do something difficult isn't going away, and the social status associated with it won't either.
    - a2ff6eeb0 29d ago
      Sure, I guess. But today, something like 30% of people play music or sing regularly enough to say they do it (ie, not very much at all). Even a couple of generations ago, it was much higher. It's not going to die out, but I think a lot of people are asking themselves if they want to bother.
sublinear 29d ago
What the hell else do you have to do?!
monsieurbanana 29d ago
You could have asked this question 10 years ago, long before llms. It's not like you'd realistically would get an ocaml job back then when there's so few of them, so why bother? The answer is still the same as well, people learn ocaml either because they enjoy it, or because learning a functional language makes them a better programmer overall and teaches your brain to approach a problem in a different way.
sgt 29d ago
Seeing that you already know programming, I'd say it'd be less risky for you. But the only reason you're able to pilot an LLM to do programming for you, is because you understand programming and architecture. But what about the future generations skipping the step of learning the OCaml's, the C's, the Python's...? It's quite concerning. Oh by the way, yes. Learn OCaml!
nine_k 29d ago
Outsourcing all the thinking to machines may have consequences you might not like. An oblique explanation: https://croissanthology.com/earring https://croissanthology.com/earring
doc_ick 29d ago
I mean if you want to let llms do everything for you go ahead. Wall-e implications aside, it seems like a great self centric life.
henryrobbins00 29d ago
Michael Clarkson teaches OCaml at Cornell. I highly recommend his free course materials [1]. He’s an excellent educator. Learning functional programming paradigms had a major influence on how I design programs. Clarkson also taught snippets from the Pragmatic Programmer, which was equally influential (as it has been for many many others) [2]. [1] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs3110/2025sp/ https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs3110/2025sp/ [2] https://pragprog.com/titles/tpp20/the-pragmatic-programmer-20th-anniversary-edition/ https://pragprog.com/titles/tpp20/the-pragmatic-programmer-2...
andsoitis 29d ago
I would sharpen my software engineering skills rather than coding / programming skills.
RobRivera 29d ago
LLMs know it anyways? Hhhmmmmm
yodsanklai 29d ago
LLM + static types is a winning combo. And if you want to be serious with what you do with your LLM, you need to understand the output to some extent. That being said, you may as well use Rust. The extra complexity of manual memory management and Rust idiosyncracies are easily dealt with by the LLM.
fuldeka 29d ago
[dead]
yawaramin 29d ago
Posting 'why should we learn' a programming language on Hacker News is top-quality ragebait :-D
zem 29d ago
you are eventually going to have a very bad time if you do not have a solid mental model of the code the LLM is writing, and indeed if you cannot steer the LLM so that its code conforms to your mental models. learning ocaml is a great way to add some valuable tools to your toolkit when it comes to thinking about code and how it fits together.
sroerick 29d ago
LLMs are better at OCaml than any other language, and being able to read and think in OCaml is very helpful to understanding LLM generated OCaml code. Also, it may very well be the decade of formal verification - if so, OCaml is a good place to be.
shevy-java 29d ago
I would not make that dependent on LLMs. If OCaml covers a use case you have, why not. Personally I try to stick within my own niche though - ruby, java and also python (ruby is unfortunately losing grounds really hard now, the writing was on the well in the last some years though, and people such as DHH are now indeed a liability rather than an asset to be had, but that's a side topic). I think what LLMs will force in the long run is to make programming languages used by real humans in a traditional way, more effective. That is, writing code by humans will have to become a lot more efficient, both time-wise and speed-wise. And for that there is always a use case IMO since LLMs are, despite the promo, incredibly stupid.
debo_ 29d ago
I think it's helpful to have a deep understanding of one c-type language, one lisp, and one ML-type language. There are so many things influenced by these three language families that being comfortable with them makes it so much easier to understand a wide variety of languages and libraries.
bigstrat2003 29d ago
Yes. LLMs do not know anything, and they will make mistakes as a result. You have to be able to check their work if you wish to do a good job.
- ryan_n 29d ago
  This isn’t really true for many programming tasks anymore. And as the saying goes, “this is the worse they will ever be”.
  - xigoi 29d ago
    > “this is the worse they will ever be” This is assuming that the current state of LLMs is sustainable, which it definitely isn’t.
lenkite 29d ago
> So (asking genuinely), should we learn these things? I wanted to learn a functional programming language with powerful type capabilities and I chose the Lean Language for that and not OCamel or Haskell. Reason being: Better type system (dependent types!), applicable in formal domains and can use it to learn math too. For your bread and butter programming, there is already JS/Go anyways. So don't see much point in learning OCamel.
rramadass 28d ago
This mindset (i.e. LLMs are available so why do i need to learn anything?) is highly insidious and will destroy your brain/mind/future if you let it. Humans are the ones who Understand, while LLMs only Know. So inter-disciplinary/cross-disciplinary insights, new modes of thinking/reasoning, flashes of insight etc. are still in the purview of Humans only. AI/LLMs can help focus and short-circuit the study of various subjects but their understanding can only happen within a human "Mind". If you do not even have basic domain knowledge (i.e. unknown unknowns) how can you even prompt/query an LLM for answers? A few illustrative examples; a) Newton came up with limits/calculus out of a need to measure continuous motion with varying speeds b) Kekule came up with the benzene ring from a dream where he saw a snake grab its own tail c) Descartes came up with the cartesian coordinates in an attempt to solve geometry via algebra etc. Each of these was a novel leap of insight bringing together various concepts to create entirely new knowledge domains. So one should learn/study the core concepts/ideas in various domains and then push the tedious mechanical labour onto the machines. In this regard see also the concept of "Active Learning" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_learning
andai 28d ago
Should I continue to walk, when technology can move me from place to place? https://tenor.com/view/tf2-wall-e-team-fortress-2-autobalance-tf2-autobalance-gif-15817843004496366015 https://tenor.com/view/tf2-wall-e-team-fortress-2-autobalanc...

ivolimmen 29d ago

Keep using your brain or you will forget stuff. Doing puzzles is great, programming in new languages is also great.

adalacelove 29d ago

Should you learn history if it is already written in a book? Should you live if others are already living?

a2ff6eeb0 29d ago
For most people, history is trivia.
- doc_ick 29d ago
  If you ignore history everything is perfect, or at least a controlled slight deviation.

xiaoyu2006 29d ago

You can also learn for your own amusement, and solely for the fun of comprehension; a lot of mathematician were driven by this. It's a shame current social value places so much utilitariaism on learning.

f1shy 29d ago
This. The question can be seen like “should I learn to solve sodoku, if a computer can do it better?”
_HMCB_ 29d ago
This ^
underlipton 29d ago
As always, it is good to be aware that many people are too anxious about more existential issues to comfortably an consistently expend effort on intellectually-taxing tasks that aren't perceived as directly related to their survival. If it's an issue with social values, it's less of one related to learning as it is to perpetuating artificial scarcity.
- deleted 29d ago
  [deleted]
- Barrin92 29d ago
  >to comfortably an consistently expend effort on intellectually-taxing tasks that aren't perceived as directly related to their survival. the average person spends 6(!) hours a day on their smartphone, the average TikTok user spends 100 minutes on the app alone. This isn't about artificial scarcity, it's about the average person looking like the Wall-E people
  - Avicebron 29d ago
    Escapism and making a concentrated effort on something are two different things. Yes it would probably be good if you could flip a switch and use the small windows of time we look at our phone per day to study OCaml, but it's not really realistic.. People who are asking these questions are saying "will me spending my time learning OCaml help me land that job that pays six figures and has health insurance so I can not rot away living on the margin". They aren't saying "I only do things that will make me money".
    - Barrin92 29d ago
      >use the small windows of time we look at our phone again, it's not a small window. It's six hours. That's almost half your waking day. People spend virtually their entire leisure time rotting away on low quality entertainment. >will me spending my time learning OCaml help me land that job that's a pointless question for one you never know if something will land you a job, new opportunities don't open up before you do something, secondly the relevant question is, should I stop doing X and start learning Ocaml, or Chinese, or take a welding class because all of that even if it doesn't work out beats scrolling through Instagram. I don't even take offense with the idea that you engage in activity that makes you money, because pure selfishness on that front would be an improvement to what most people are doing now.
aaplok 29d ago
I like baking. There are machines that can bake bread at an industrial scale that I cannot compete with. There are home kneaders that do much of the work very well. I use one of those more often than not. I still think it worth my time kneading dough by hand. It teaches me the various properties of flour, how external factors like humidity or temperature impact the overall process, and I believe that it makes me a better baker, even when I use a machine, because I am better at controlling what the machine does. When I get a new brand of flour I will make sure to bake everything by hand first to "get a feel". Kneading by hand is also very relaxing to me. This is probably the main reason I bake in the first place. Programming, and other activities are not very different. We now have machines that can do it faster, at a fraction of the quality many people deem good enough. If you hate coding, that is probably all you need to use, and learning a new language might just be a frustrating experience not worth subjecting yourself to. But if you enjoy coding then it should make you better at it, even when you use the machines.

dadoum 29d ago

My experience with OCaml has transformed how I think about programming and complex system design. This may also be true if you learn any other functional programming language, but OCaml is easy and flexible which makes it good imo as a door towards the more formal part of comp sci. Even for steering an LLM I think this might help.

f1shy 29d ago
My experience with lisp was exactly that: it completely changed how I think about programming, but much more, how I think about systems and engineering. (I learned it through SICP)

ahoka 29d ago

Why learn an instrument when you can just press play?

a2ff6eeb0 29d ago
Cultural inertia: until recently, you couldn't just press play and get even a wide selection of music: for most of history, if you wanted music, you had to make it or hire someone to do it for you. More recently, you had to go to the store and buy it, which meant you didn't have much variety. Today, learning an instrument is for social status, inheriting the shine of the past, where music was rare and costly. The reason to learn an instrument today is because the former situation was romanticized. It'll probably take a generation before people ease into guilt-free enjoying infinite, fully generated music.
- toolslive 29d ago
  your body needs exercise or you end up an obese couch potato. Your mind is similar: it needs exercise or you end up a dunce.
  - deleted 29d ago
    [deleted]
- jonahx 29d ago
  These theories sound vaguely plausible. I would rate them as about 5% true and 95% false, as explanation of the past and prediction of the future. The satisfaction of learning to do something difficult isn't going away, and the social status associated with it won't either.
  - a2ff6eeb0 29d ago
    Sure, I guess. But today, something like 30% of people play music or sing regularly enough to say they do it (ie, not very much at all). Even a couple of generations ago, it was much higher. It's not going to die out, but I think a lot of people are asking themselves if they want to bother.

sublinear 29d ago

What the hell else do you have to do?!

monsieurbanana 29d ago

You could have asked this question 10 years ago, long before llms. It's not like you'd realistically would get an ocaml job back then when there's so few of them, so why bother? The answer is still the same as well, people learn ocaml either because they enjoy it, or because learning a functional language makes them a better programmer overall and teaches your brain to approach a problem in a different way.

sgt 29d ago

Seeing that you already know programming, I'd say it'd be less risky for you. But the only reason you're able to pilot an LLM to do programming for you, is because you understand programming and architecture. But what about the future generations skipping the step of learning the OCaml's, the C's, the Python's...? It's quite concerning. Oh by the way, yes. Learn OCaml!

nine_k 29d ago

Outsourcing all the thinking to machines may have consequences you might not like. An oblique explanation: https://croissanthology.com/earring https://croissanthology.com/earring

doc_ick 29d ago

I mean if you want to let llms do everything for you go ahead. Wall-e implications aside, it seems like a great self centric life.

henryrobbins00 29d ago

Michael Clarkson teaches OCaml at Cornell. I highly recommend his free course materials [1]. He’s an excellent educator. Learning functional programming paradigms had a major influence on how I design programs. Clarkson also taught snippets from the Pragmatic Programmer, which was equally influential (as it has been for many many others) [2]. [1] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs3110/2025sp/ https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs3110/2025sp/ [2] https://pragprog.com/titles/tpp20/the-pragmatic-programmer-20th-anniversary-edition/ https://pragprog.com/titles/tpp20/the-pragmatic-programmer-2...

andsoitis 29d ago

I would sharpen my software engineering skills rather than coding / programming skills.

RobRivera 29d ago

LLMs know it anyways? Hhhmmmmm

yodsanklai 29d ago

LLM + static types is a winning combo. And if you want to be serious with what you do with your LLM, you need to understand the output to some extent. That being said, you may as well use Rust. The extra complexity of manual memory management and Rust idiosyncracies are easily dealt with by the LLM.

fuldeka 29d ago

[dead]

yawaramin 29d ago

Posting 'why should we learn' a programming language on Hacker News is top-quality ragebait :-D

zem 29d ago

you are eventually going to have a very bad time if you do not have a solid mental model of the code the LLM is writing, and indeed if you cannot steer the LLM so that its code conforms to your mental models. learning ocaml is a great way to add some valuable tools to your toolkit when it comes to thinking about code and how it fits together.

sroerick 29d ago

LLMs are better at OCaml than any other language, and being able to read and think in OCaml is very helpful to understanding LLM generated OCaml code. Also, it may very well be the decade of formal verification - if so, OCaml is a good place to be.

shevy-java 29d ago

I would not make that dependent on LLMs. If OCaml covers a use case you have, why not. Personally I try to stick within my own niche though - ruby, java and also python (ruby is unfortunately losing grounds really hard now, the writing was on the well in the last some years though, and people such as DHH are now indeed a liability rather than an asset to be had, but that's a side topic). I think what LLMs will force in the long run is to make programming languages used by real humans in a traditional way, more effective. That is, writing code by humans will have to become a lot more efficient, both time-wise and speed-wise. And for that there is always a use case IMO since LLMs are, despite the promo, incredibly stupid.

debo_ 29d ago

I think it's helpful to have a deep understanding of one c-type language, one lisp, and one ML-type language. There are so many things influenced by these three language families that being comfortable with them makes it so much easier to understand a wide variety of languages and libraries.

bigstrat2003 29d ago

Yes. LLMs do not know anything, and they will make mistakes as a result. You have to be able to check their work if you wish to do a good job.

ryan_n 29d ago
This isn’t really true for many programming tasks anymore. And as the saying goes, “this is the worse they will ever be”.
- xigoi 29d ago
  > “this is the worse they will ever be” This is assuming that the current state of LLMs is sustainable, which it definitely isn’t.

lenkite 29d ago

> So (asking genuinely), should we learn these things? I wanted to learn a functional programming language with powerful type capabilities and I chose the Lean Language for that and not OCamel or Haskell. Reason being: Better type system (dependent types!), applicable in formal domains and can use it to learn math too. For your bread and butter programming, there is already JS/Go anyways. So don't see much point in learning OCamel.

rramadass 28d ago

This mindset (i.e. LLMs are available so why do i need to learn anything?) is highly insidious and will destroy your brain/mind/future if you let it. Humans are the ones who Understand, while LLMs only Know. So inter-disciplinary/cross-disciplinary insights, new modes of thinking/reasoning, flashes of insight etc. are still in the purview of Humans only. AI/LLMs can help focus and short-circuit the study of various subjects but their understanding can only happen within a human "Mind". If you do not even have basic domain knowledge (i.e. unknown unknowns) how can you even prompt/query an LLM for answers? A few illustrative examples; a) Newton came up with limits/calculus out of a need to measure continuous motion with varying speeds b) Kekule came up with the benzene ring from a dream where he saw a snake grab its own tail c) Descartes came up with the cartesian coordinates in an attempt to solve geometry via algebra etc. Each of these was a novel leap of insight bringing together various concepts to create entirely new knowledge domains. So one should learn/study the core concepts/ideas in various domains and then push the tedious mechanical labour onto the machines. In this regard see also the concept of "Active Learning" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_learning

andai 28d ago

Should I continue to walk, when technology can move me from place to place? https://tenor.com/view/tf2-wall-e-team-fortress-2-autobalance-tf2-autobalance-gif-15817843004496366015 https://tenor.com/view/tf2-wall-e-team-fortress-2-autobalanc...