Hacker News Reader

I attended the talk Yaron gave so I have a little context - OCaml is definitely, definitely worth it, and I feel like I have a decent grasp of the language after only 3 weeks of working with it, to the point that I can make useful, large programs.

I've learnt Haskell in the past and it was slow primarily because Learn You a Haskell is I think poorly written.

Read Yaron's book Real World OCaml. It's great.

View on HN

I was also shocked how quickly I was able to write code in OCaml after having no prior experience with static typing. A couple weeks in and I was quite comfortable.

Definitely. I learned OCaml from the online tutorial and that gave me a pretty good starting point in a few weeks. Compared to the Haskell tutorial on Haskell's website, it focuses a lot more on building real programs versus the sort of REPL-based approach given on the Haskell site (which basically doesn't teach anything more than short one-liners due to its limitations). And even the most popular Haskell book (LYAH) is a worse resource IMO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com