[HN Gopher] OCaml Programming: Correct and Efficient and Beautiful
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       OCaml Programming: Correct and Efficient and Beautiful
        
       Author : smartmic
       Score  : 43 points
       Date   : 2025-07-26 21:18 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (cs3110.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (cs3110.github.io)
        
       | teiferer wrote:
       | Could an OCaml expert give a quick take on the view that if FP,
       | why not go all the way and do Haskell instead? I mean, if
       | "correct, efficient, beautiful" are attributes of OCaml (and I
       | know opinions differ, but let's assume for a moment..) then
       | shouldn't they be attributes of Haskell too, maybe even more so
       | in some ways?
        
         | skybrian wrote:
         | I'm not an OCaml or Haskell expert, but I expect that laziness
         | makes performance harder to reason about?
        
         | OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote:
         | At least theoretically they could be however OCaml is in large
         | part driven by Jane Street and has been for some time now and
         | Jane Street's entire business model is built around optimizing
         | for ultra high throughput, ultra low latency software where
         | mistakes could cost on the order of hundreds of billions of
         | dollars.
         | 
         | So my guess would be less that Haskell is not these things (nor
         | couldn't it be) but rather that OCaml has had the external
         | forces necessary to optimise for these things above all else.
        
       | iLoveOncall wrote:
       | There's absolutely nothing efficient nor beautiful about
       | programming in OCaml.
        
       | crvdgc wrote:
       | Apart from being tied with Jane Street's libraries, _Real World
       | OCaml_ is  "deeper" in that it also talks about implementation
       | details. This book has a more "introduction to functional
       | programming via OCaml" vibe. Both are good textbooks with
       | different emphases.
       | 
       | The main author Michael Clarkson also started a similar lecture
       | series on _Software Foundations_ using Rocq (Coq)[1]. Not sure if
       | that 's still updated though.
       | 
       | [1]: https://github.com/clarksmr/sf-lectures
        
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       (page generated 2025-07-26 23:00 UTC)