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by jallmann 3961 days ago
Excellent article, very clever optimizations given the tradeoffs. From the article:

> We were talking about students' tendency to let the compiler substitute for thinking

This is actually why I use OCaml. Not going to comment on whether useful error messages are a detriment to pedagogy, but offloading thinking to the compiler is a lifesaver.

1 comments

Definitely. It doesn't prevent, say, off-by-one errors (and in general, errors when you manipulate several items of the same type), but if you structure your program correctly, you can be very confident about your code.

Though OCaml's errors are not always the most explicit or nicely written.