My First Experience with OCaml

pliutau.com

16 points·pltvss··4 comments

I think it was a pretty ambitious first project in OCaml, which is vastly different from the languages you came from.

I took a similar path years ago and I found your situation akin to mine. The documentation is spotty, full of gaps, particularly for a new comer; although I found some reasonable books that helped "OCaml from the very beginning, 2013" and "Real world OCaml 2nd edition, 2022".

I love OCaml but I don't see myself going back to it. I love re-reading old code that has been cleaned up. It reads like perfect design. It's satisfying.

However I found writing OCaml to be painful, battling the syntax and the LSP. The LSP being actively highlighting everything red due to one typo, because the syntax is this way, and it's frustrating... And sure, you can work without LSP support, but it's useful than cmd+tabbing 300 times to run the program and watch it crash on typos. The right balance is to turn it off and turn it back on at times.

But once finished, and years down the line, re-reading completed OCaml projects is a joy. I'd like to imagine that it made me a better programmer in other languages; due to the type-system-first approach, and transformation of data through functional programming.

Looks like this is the project they do when they try other programming languages. Check out this other post from their blog where they tried Gleam.

https://pliutau.com/my-first-experience-with-gleam-lang/

Added a part about tests as well.

FYI you had more action on Lobsters regarding this post https://lobste.rs/s/c800ba/my_first_experience_with_ocaml

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