Tho initially all those years back IIRC I wanted to tinker with how it installs mods for the Linux native "enhanced" editions. Otherwise I wouldn't even know what it's written in.
I've personally fixed an early noughties Perl script where one of the modules it used had changed its name (but thankfully not the interface, not significantly at least), among a couple of other compat problems. Fixing it turned out pretty straightforward even for someone who's far from a greybeard Perl "hacker".
A big part of the problem wasn't that you couldn't write good code with Perl, but that there were too many ways to write bad code with it. That made it anathema for any sort of corporate development, which is the main driver of programming language progress.
This sort of lead into trouble at one time, as the author chose to use the OCaml serialization of data as the protocol, so synchronization between 32- and 64-bit platforms or even binaries compiled with different versions of OCaml was not possible. Eventually this was fixed, though, with custom serialization.
Personally, I'm glad that this isn't yet another Rust post ;)
Unlike Perl, OCaml is AOT compiled in a very efficient machine code, has a good static type system and has a good concurrency support. Both are not very mainstream.
dlcarrier•2mo ago
One of my favorite programs, an ncurses-based RPN calculator called Orpie, is written in OCaml, but I've never messed around with it.
Crespyl•2mo ago
I'm not extremely familiar with any of the ML family, but Eric Lippert had a blog series I followed for a while in which he was writing a Z-Machine in OCaml: https://ericlippert.com/2016/02/01/west-of-house/ I followed along but in Rust for a while, though I think he paused the project at some point and I lost steam.
I learned more about Rust (which, IIRC was first implemented in OCaml) than I did about OCaml, but it's always seemed like a nice language.
yawaramin•2mo ago
Yoric•2mo ago
nextos•2mo ago
For example, https://opam.ocaml.org/packages/why3 is a little marvel of engineering.
yawaramin•2mo ago
antonvs•2mo ago
yawaramin•2mo ago
tome•2mo ago
yawaramin•2mo ago
Anyway, looks like or-patterns just landed as a GHC extension:
I still like OCaml's (built-in) syntax better: Which I feel stems from its elegant decision to use the pipe character as the 'alternative pattern prefix':tome•2mo ago
How is that?
StopDisinfo910•2mo ago
9.10.3 is a patch for the 9.10 version which was published after 9.12.1 but relates to an older version. Haskell keeps maintaining multiple versions of the toolchain.
antonvs•2mo ago
poulpy123•2mo ago
It is one of these small languages that are not completely niche: it is taught and used, you'll be able to do plenty of things, but there is not the community and resources you find in the big ones or even the mid-sized ones
yawaramin•2mo ago
cdaringe•2mo ago