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by camus2 3407 days ago
Unfortunatly Ocaml has many drawbacks:

the developer experience isn't great, it's complicated to install and to get started with and the ecosystem related to web development is quite poor. That's not the case for F# and I really really hope it picks up steam. ML languages are really great when it comes to data modelling, domain driven design, writing algorithms and stuff like that. they are a nice compromise between pure FP and OOP.
2 comments
agentultra 3407 days ago
I think the only complicated part of the developer experience is something Javascript developers have become accustomed to: multiple compilers and complicated build tools. But you get over it.

There are some nice tools as well: merlin, utop, and friends.

As to the ecosystem, I beg to differ: the ocsigen suite of tools (lwt, server, js_of_ocaml), Core, Bucklescript, etc. They're all amazing, well documented, and open source.

I think both languages are quite nice honestly. F# has become a lot more attractive now that .NET is more readily available on more platforms. I hope it gains more steam too!

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camus2 3407 days ago
> I think the only complicated part of the developer experience is something Javascript developers have become accustomed to: multiple compilers and complicated build tools. But you get over it.

With Javascript all that bullshit is optional, it's not with Ocaml. The JS asset pipeline is totally irrelevant here, and certainly not a good example of how an ecosystem should be.

> But you get over it.

no you really don't, and you shouldn't.

> As to the ecosystem, I beg to differ: the ocsigen suite of tools (lwt, server, js_of_ocaml), Core, Bucklescript, etc. They're all amazing, well documented, and open source.

Now Compare with .NET ecosysem . I was looking for a good MongoDB driver in Ocaml the other day, didn't any good one.

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agentultra 3407 days ago
It's going to be hard for any language to compete with the .NET ecosystem due to the hundreds of millions of dollars of funding it gets from industry compared to OCaml.

There's still room for both and they're still both great languages. That F# is quite similar to OCaml is a good thing... it means there must be some good ideas in there. :)

As for a MongoDB driver I found https://opam.ocaml.org/packages/mongo/mongo.0.67.2/ on OPAM in a few seconds. OPAM has been huge.

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yawaramin 3407 days ago
With BuckleScript available now, you always have the option to reuse any existing JavaScript libraries with some simple bindings. You can even deploy to node.
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aryehof 3406 days ago
How is it good for domain driven design? Can you point to where I can learn more of this?
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