Looks like OCaml was not your first language. I suspect you are coming from a imperative language background.
OCaml is slow? and your recommendation is to use Haskell instead... That doesn't compute well if we were to assume that you are writing some compute-intensive tasks for which (unoptimized non-C language can be "slower".
It more likely the case that students hate whatever languages the university teaches in place of language-de-jour. (Just read the reviews of SICP on Amazon).
And yes there are pages on the internet that are older than 2006, so what? No one goes "Pffft.. this is 300 years old.." when they come across Newton's Principa.
> And yes there are pages on the internet that are older than 2006, so what? No one goes "Pffft.. this is 300 years old.." when they come across Newton's Principa.
The difference is that programming languages evolve all the time. Having such an old page still up and promoted to the front page of Hacker News tells everyone that OCaml hasn't evolved since 2006.
Well, I pretty love javascript, is it an imperative language? ;)
Please don't be so sharp, I really don't understand why this link is in HN, and I'm just exposing my point of view, after practising OCaml a lot. So what, I'm a student so my opinion is worthless?
Ah yes, the "functional" and "object oriented" Javascript, how I love thee.
When you are starting out, convenience and familiarity (which are visceral) can trump abstract notions like "pure", "correct", "reason-able".
I'm not saying your opinion is worthless, just that your judgement could be coloured by inexperience.
My sincere recommendation is to use "Real World OCaml" - https://realworldocaml.org/ as a reference to learn OCaml instead of old and busted tutorials littering the internet. Trust me, I have been trying to learn OCaml "on the side" for a few years and RWO is the first book that I have absolute love (even accounting for a wide variety of PL books I read) for being
practical, current and explaining stuff.
OCaml is slow? and your recommendation is to use Haskell instead... That doesn't compute well if we were to assume that you are writing some compute-intensive tasks for which (unoptimized non-C language can be "slower".
It more likely the case that students hate whatever languages the university teaches in place of language-de-jour. (Just read the reviews of SICP on Amazon).
And yes there are pages on the internet that are older than 2006, so what? No one goes "Pffft.. this is 300 years old.." when they come across Newton's Principa.