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by enugu 568 days ago
OCaml is not an unsophisticated language. It inherits the features of ML and has first class modules, which is not present by default in Haskell (present in backpack). Not having first class modules leads to a lot of issues.

Also, there is a better story for compilation to the web.
1 comments
wyager 568 days ago
OCaml's type system is quite janky and simplistic compared to Haskell's. The first class module system is fairly nice, although it leads to an annoying problem where now you kind of have two "levels" to the language (module level and normal level). This is arguably analogous to Haskell having a "term level language" and a "type level language", where the type system is more prolog-y than the term language. Also, Haskell's type system is powerful enough to do most of the things you'd want the OCaml module system for, and more. I do occasionally miss the OCaml module system, but not most of the time.
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RandomThoughts3 568 days ago
Conversely, the Ocaml module system is powerful enough to do all the things you had want to do with Haskell except the Ocaml module system is nice to use.

Anyway, the issue has nothing to do with relative powerfulness. The issue is that the Haskell community encourages practices which lead to unreadable code: lot of new operators, point-free, fancy abstraction. Meanwhile, the Ocaml community was always very different with a general dislike of overly fancy things when they were not unavoidable.

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wyager 565 days ago
> except the Ocaml module system is nice to use

This comment doesn't lead me to believe you've ever worked in an ocaml shop. It's only "nice to use" for trivial use cases, but quickly devolves into a "functorial" mess in practice

> the Ocaml community was always very different with a general dislike of overly fancy things when they were not unavoidable

This is the exact thing that people always say when they are coping about their language being underpowered.

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kreetx 568 days ago
If by "encourages" you mean "has features", then yes. The typical haskell shop doesn't really encourage complex feature use, it's the people learning/online who don't actually need to work within their solutions, do. That's what seems to draw (some) people to haskell.
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