OT: interesting talk by Jane Street technical guy on why they used Ocaml

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Sunday, 4 October 2015 at 00:45:16 UTC, Mengu wrote:
> i watched this talk by yaron last year when i was looking at 
> alternatives for sml. i was taking the programming languages 
> course on coursera by dan grossman. ocaml looked like it tooked 
> off at the beginning of 2000s but then due to many problems it 
> failed to be a mainstream language.

interesting, thanks.  I played with ocaml a little, but simply 
didn't have time to do more than that.  I was interested in the 
commercial aspects of his experience, as that happens to resonate 
with my own experience.

> imho, D will never take off like go or rust because people who 
> adopted these languages are mostly python and ruby developers.

rust is only barely out of beta, and doesn't yet seem to be used 
in many enterprises, whereas D's status is rather different given 
the size of firms built on it.  I know what you mean about 
perceptions, and that perhaps may change now you have two of the 
best C++ programmers working on it fulltime, and not just one ;)

> D has an incredibly creative and helpful community yet our 
> community is not as enthusiastic as go's and rust's community.

why do you think that is ?  one reason might be different kind of 
use cases.  one has a different emotional experience and draws 
different kinds of people for some kinds of projects than others, 
and that's surely reflected in the tone of the community.  also 
things just have their own spirit, and that is what it is, and 
enthusiasm can be a positive thing, but isn't without drawbacks 
either.  I'd say I am impressed by the sheer grit people have, 
and that's something important too.

> phobos is extremely a great library yet not very welcoming and 
> feels overly complicated. we should reduce the amount of WTFs 
> when reading the phobos source and docs.

look at the rate of change as well as the level.  the docs could 
be better, and we could have more blog posts.  but picture is 
much better than when I first looked at D a couple of years back. 
  I remember trying for ages just to get std.net.curl to work and 
almost giving up in despair.  (I noticed recently docs were still 
wrong, so I fixed them).  we should give ourselves credit for the 
distance travelled, even if there's a long road further to get to 
where we want.


Laeeth.