pauldirac137

The author says: "If you have a reason to think that OCaml is the best choice for a new project please let me know your use case, I’m genuinely curious." I think it's overwhelmingly the best language for writing an interpreter or a compiler. I'm sure Haskell is also a good language for writing compilers, but whenever I tried writing interpreters in Haskell, I found myself fighting the laziness. Most of the criticisms listed strike me as things that bother people starting out in the language (syntax etc.) but which quickly become non-issues with more experience. And my experience with opam/dune has been _much_ more pleasant than with Cabal in Haskell (though ghcup has certainly improved matters). I think the infrastructure in OCaml, which admittedly used to be quite poor, is now on par with any other language, if not better. However, if your application domain is one in which few OCaml libraries exist (e.g. web programming) you probably should look elsewhere.

Nano is OK, I guess, but it's a bit bloated. Now ed(1) -- that's an editor!

Can you be more specific? Show us the code that isn't working.

I would hesitate to call polymorphic variants "part of the OO infrastructure". They are really orthogonal to OO, but they do make OO less necessary. Ironically, OCaml has a really nice OO system but it's rarely used because with modules and functors there is little need for it. Put differently, a lot of the conventional use for OO is as a poor man's module system, and when you have a really good module system, you only use OO when you absolutely need the OO kind of polymorphism, and those cases are surprisingly rare (like existential types in Haskell).

You're right, but ST is also implemented using unsafePerformIO. The larger point is that you don't need to dress up a type signature with ST or IO just to use imperative code internally which can't leak out to the user level. Whether this is good or bad is a matter for debate, but used judiciously I think it's good.

Well, maybe "writing a compiler"? or "building a multimillion-dollar Wall Street financial services firm"? :-)

In fact, I love and use both Haskell and Ocaml, and I view the two languages as cousins. Both are functional. Both have features the other doesn't. Ocaml has the best module system in the business, with functors for module abstraction (unbelievably useful). This is much better than the current Haskell module system, though Backpack may narrow the gap. Ocaml also has polymorphic variants, which are surprisingly useful. Ocaml has some convenience features like named/optional arguments that Haskell doesn't. And oddly enough, the lack of purity in Ocaml (if used judiciously) can be a real win. You can do imperative programming without jumping through a lot of hoops. You can have code which is purely functional from the outside but which uses imperative idioms internally for efficiency (yes, I know about unsafePerformIO in Haskell, but it's much easier to do this sort of thing in Ocaml). And Ocaml is usually faster both in compilation time and run time.

My overall take on it is that I prefer Haskell for small-scale programming but I prefer Ocaml for large-scale programming. YMMV.

Correct. Multicore _may_ come in 4.04 if we're lucky. No ETA for modular implicits AFAICT, but I really want them ASAP; they will be a game-changer.

If you've been away from Ocaml for a while, this would be a great time to check out what's changed. A package manager, a new optimizer, and we'll soon have modular implicits (think Haskell-style type classes, but better) and multicore. Ocaml is really a first-rate programming language and I wish more people knew about it.

Harper is nowhere near as bad, fortunately. No F-bombs, for one thing. Harper is opinionated, curmudgeonly and sometimes arguably unfair, but he always backs up his opinions with reasoned arguments. Even when you don't like the way he expresses himself, he always has something insightful to say.

Yeah, when reading Harper it's best to skip over the opinion parts and just read the technical content (which is fortunately plentiful). I always feel as if he's jealous of Haskell's success.

Agree with everything you said, and I'd also add polymorphic variants. I too am a Haskeller now writing mostly Ocaml. I view the two languages as cousins. Both have great features the other doesn't. Both are worth learning and using.