Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbpatterson | Hacker News Reader

It is really bizarre to contrast Real World OCaml to Learn You a Haskell. The former is a serious book, the latter is a very beginner level tutorial. Now there may be real criticisms comparing Real World OCaml to Real World Haskell (which, if from the names alone, would seem like a much more appropriate comparison), but saying "this beginner tutorial doesn't explain how the runtime works" is a little silly.

View on HN

(Author here)

I think it's totally fair. The whole reason I wrote this post is to help people decide which resources to not use. I love LYAH but I don't care who it was written for. I wanted people to know, specifically, what they were missing with books like that, because it was not obvious to me when I started that I should not start with LYAH (or at least, that I should have kept in mind what it was missing).

I think the comparison is absolutely essential. I always want a guide to the resources about a topic so that I can find out where to look to learn the way I want to learn.

But the judgment is probably strong. Right now, my immediate reason to learn OCaml is because Types and Programming Languages uses it for its type checkers. For that purpose, I might just want quicker tutorials that don't cover the runtime. Ditto if my primary goal is to learn more about using types for good API design. On the other hand, if I learn and continue with the language, or want to put it into production, the runtime is essential. There's lots of use cases out there.

Yeah, I agree, I was probably too hard on LYAH. But, even if my goals didn't match your goals, I am hoping that the information I am giving you is sort of useful either way. The emphasis is really on the reasoning, rather than the conclusion.

It is useful either way. I love the idea of this post, and I wish it existed and was findable for every topic I'm interested in.

Thanks for the article. I'm in the same boat you were -- picked up ocaml a couple of times but it hasn't "stuck".

Is dead-tree RWO worthwhile or is it going to become obsolete quickly? I like (prefer) reading on paper, but I've been having a hard time over the past few years justifying the purchase of books that are destined for the recycle bin within a year.

The authors are pretty conscientious about basing the book on tech that's mostly here to stay. For example, camlp4 is not included because it's on it's way out.

So, there's no way to say for sure, but I think there's a reasonable chance it sticks around.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com