To be honest, anyone who used Ocaml understands immediately that the author gave it no chance and went looking for problems. It’s obvious because the post lingers a lot about things which are not actually issues like type conversion but don’t talk about the very real issues Ocaml has (opam is not great, dune is weird).
Why are these things not issues? I think it's totally valid for someone who doesn't understand OCaml to raise issues of usability or documentation. It's not just the issues of experts that are a concern. And it's very demoralizing to get a "you're holding it wrong" response to a complaint.
Because they are not issues on a day to day basis when you use the language.
I used Ocaml for a paid internship some years ago. I was very much a beginner. Do you know how many time I felt at loss or annoyed by type conversion or the precedence rules for various part of the syntax? I never did.
The truth is you never encounter the precedence rules when writing Ocaml normally using parentheses like a normal human being and you don’t convert that much between exotic types. Most of the conversion you actually do are between the same types and most of the time you have to write converter anyway because there is logic involved. I worked professionally as a Java developer for a bit. I think I had to write more conversion code between weird classes then than I ever did in Ocaml.
The issue is not telling people they are "holding it wrong". The issue is that this is not what’s going to annoy you as an Ocaml beginner.
The author of this article is not even an Ocaml beginner by the way. That’s actually someone who used to work on the Haskell compiler.
> The issue is that this is not what’s going to annoy you as an Ocaml beginner.
Sure, but tbf, the post is about what annoys the author, not what would annoy beginners. As you say, the author is not a beginner, and so their problems wouldn't be beginner problems.
That’s not the point I was making. They are not expert problems either. How often as an expert do you think you encounter precedence issues you were not encountering as a beginner?
> Because they are not issues on a day to day basis when you use the language.
They still are. You just internalize them. Progammers are the world's greatest masochists with the world's biggest Stockholm syndromes, and we don't like to admit it.
For example, his pain points about syntax ambiguity are absolutely valid, and true. However, when you "use the language every day" you learn to avoid those constructs and extract them into separate functions for example because "that's how it's always done, and it's a nice little quirk of the language".
No, the syntax parts he criticises are not this kind (they are not ambiguous by the way). What’s in the article is very unidiomatic OCaml incorrectly intended purposefully to make it look like it’s doing something else than what it does.
You don’t write tuples without parentheses because it’s weird, harder to read and no one does it. Same for the precedence rules of expression. You just use begin and end for blocks like you would use braces in C because you actually want to write a block. No one is just randomly writing nested code without them because well it doesn’t work.
It’s not a quirk. The author is just complaining that you have to mark blocks like in every language. That’s a weird thing to complain about.
I agree that the lack of as-hoc polymorphism is a downside (I don’t agree with how the article presents it but the article is disingenuous from the start anyway). Everyone would like to have modular implicit.
> This is exactly what I wrote, but in a Stockholm-syndrome-y way.
Do you complain about having to put braces around C expressions to not get unexpected behaviour from the compiler?
> He points out a real ambiguity in the syntax where the parser literally parses the same-looking and same-behaving statements completely differently.
No, he doesn’t. If that what you got from the article, you were bamboozled. He points out that match, try and (;) have different precedence which is not ambiguous. Writing begin and end is not a workaround. That’s how you mark blocks which is what he should have done because, well, he wants a block.
Erlang has exactly the same issue if you write unidiomatic code by the way.
That’s unsurprising because "don’t write code implicitly relying on precedence behaviour" is taught to virtually all beginners in most programming languages.
It’s perfectly legitimate code and working code. It’s just hard to read.
Should language prevents you from writing hard to read code if it means making trade off? I personally think that’s what linters are for but you are free to disagree.
I’m going to bed and don’t think I will revisit this comment thread. It’s probably the longest discussion I ever had about syntax points you don’t even encounter while using the language.
I have fond memory of writing OCaml. It’s nice to use. It gets out of your way. The compiler is quick. It gives nice error message. The syntax and semantics are flexible enough and elegant enough than you don’t feel like your fighting the language and your code feels nice. That’s what matters to me at the end of the day.
It's a spectrum. Most languages have some ways to write bad code, but there are definitely languages that have more or fewer ways compared to other languages. E.g. languages with simpler precedence rules, like Lisp or TCL, avoid this particular issue because you just can't write code with unintuitive precedence (although in the case of Lisp people often end up writing a macro that recapitulates the problem).
Primitive conversions are as simple as `<type>_of_<newType>(myValue)`. For example, `int_of_float(2.0)` will give you an integer. `string_of_int(123)` will return a string. Noting very surprising.
If you want to do more complex conversions, you have to write those functions and call them.
I don't much care for Ocaml syntax (StandardML is a better language in basically every way and ReasonML is Ocaml with better syntax), but this isn't a big deal.
The type system will know if you don't handle a potential conversion.
This restriction is better for pretty much every real-world use case anyway.
If you don't know what you're converting, then you are almost guaranteed to be getting garbage out the other end. If you do know what you are converting, being explicit and covering all your options isn't a big deal.
And of course, you can pack this all away in a module if you really want too. Modules are more flexible than typeclasses in a language like Haskell anyway (as you can't have multiple typeclass definitions in Haskell).
In truth, I believe module typeclasses (typeclasses only definable in modules) would be a nice addition. It would allow flexibility while creating a pattern that actively discourages the abuse you see in Haskell where typeclasses quickly devolve into unreadable garbage.
I've been using opam and dune for a few years now and they haven't annoyed me much since I got used to how to set up projects. What are the issues with them?
It's more that only really strongly disagreed with that point. Frankly, there are some cons with using Ocaml. In practice, I think the library support for ocaml isn't completely there given the small community.
It does sound to me like you stopped reading after the first point. Maybe you didn't give the post a chance?