Language debates: Ocaml

[pnathan]

A few years ago, I went on a "best language for home development" hunt. I sorted through pretty much all I knew and came out the other side with "Ocaml".

Some 1100 lines of Ocaml later, I terminated the project.

Couple reasons.

• Generics without type specialization are painful. At some point, you have to concretize, and different types are, actually, different.
• Similarly, the lack of good generics meant things like printing was painful[1].
• The libraries for web interaction were very much inadequate, and tended to be async. I don't like or want async in my codebases, so that was aggravating.
• Similarly, the libraries for interacting with postgres weren't great.
• Build system initially was horrible; eventually things moved to a more stable point, but the hand was really burnt.
• Modules fried my hair. Powerful and deeply opaque - even after reading most of the docs.
• Docs were bad

I'd like to believe it's better now. I invested a lot of time into that code. The concision was fantastic. That said, the friction was very high.

I went and did things with Scala after that...

1. See Go.