Luckily people giving the job interview also don't understand OOP. It's just 1 of those words that acts like a secret handshake, just like "clean code". I actuality read Uncle Bob's Clean Code and replied to a job interview that had clean code as requirement. They didn't know what function hoisting in js was so they were very confused at the fact that I was doing the Clean Code as instructed by the book. Which made me confused as to why they put Clean Code as a requirement to start with. Apparently they were talking about just basic indentation and naming variables somewhat sensible, this was a Medior position.
Most people's version of "OOP" is just glorified procedural programming. OOP certainly comes in handy. But for most projects, its best as a seasoning rather than the full meal.
@@IBelieveInCodePeople who "throw away" OOP don't understand it and are actually using it. OOP isn't classes and inheritance, it's design patterns and SOLID design principles. Unfortunately, most devs still don't know SOLID.
I used to compare my workflow to yours thinking I was doing terrible because you don't look too old, then I realized you were already programming professionally when I was 7 and that kinda changes things lol
"If more people will write in OCaml then, people will write in OCaml more." That's a good point actually. And now I want to try to make a game with Raylib in OCaml lol
FP checklist (if you haven't seen it yet): - -20 years of Excel- - some Lisp experience (idk which one tho) - some Haskell-like experience (a day of Elm, then some PureScript, Haskell or Idris) - some Erlang experience (probably Elixir)
@@anon-fz2bo Excel is the most popular purely functional language on the planet. Change my mind (it even got =LAMBDA([p0, p1, …] ) recently) Of course a day of Elm ain't Haskell. But it very quickly gives you a solid understanding of the basics. You can easily build a mental model for how evaluation works, understand why execution is just an implementation detail and so on. It's small (focused), well-documented and easily approachable. That's what matters for beginners. After a day or two, you can move on to the real deal. You got shadowhammered btw (had to jump through some YT hoops to see your reply)
Some years ago I started ocaml, but I went to Haskell and F# . But F# its basically ocaml with more stuff and other functionalities. Ocaml is so underrated like Erlang. Been doing lot of stuff with FP languages last years, and Haskell and F# are part of my life basically. I started with C , 28/30 years ago, still love C for sure 👌
F# is awesome. I wish learning resources were more plentiful and better designed, but I'll admit it's probably the language I'm most interested in picking up right now.
A lot of people here are hating on abstractions. Even boolean algebra is not how the cpu works. There are millions of transistor connected in a manner to basic operations possible. So replicating that complexity everywhere would be stupid.
I never understood either. As far as FP languages go, OCaml is actually a fairly simple language too. It's orders of magnitude simpler than Haskell, Scala or Rust (if you count that as FP), which are all more popular.
@@AlJay0032 Rust isn't FP. It's a cleaner C++ with concepts from Haskell, but it's not designed to be used as a FP language. You can write some functional code with it, but that's really not what it's good at. Haskell had a lot of great ideas, people just overall kind of hate FP for doing real work.
Spot on! The first language I was exposed to was Basic on a Commodore64. Haskell is so hard for me I periodically pick it up and throw it away, yet it fascinates me.
@@aoeu256 Hey, thanks for the reply! I'm not familiar with Eff, though that sounds interesting (need to look up what "algebraic side effects" are, though). Unfortunately, I constantly lament the fact that, as much as I love Lisp (I got pretty good at one point writing Emacs Lisp, though I admit my macro fu is weak), Lisp lacks something that I feel is one of the features I liked most about ML: its strong static type system. I sometimes wonder why they haven't come out with a Lisp that has this feature (or maybe that's just SML/OCaml/Scala etc., just sans macros).
I think the problem why Functional programming is less popular is in part that they don't have anyone like a Bob Martin (love him or hate him) out there trying to explain how to do it. It's always discussion on pure functions, and Monads and endofunctors and oh gosh i just want to know how to do this thing i know how to do proceduraly/imperativly.
That’s why people should read grokking simplicity which does a really really good job at teaching functional programming without saying monad/functor and all of the seemingly scary stuff. Eric Normand always does a great job teaching in general…. A lisp programmer but this particular book uses JS to be friendly to everyone
When people say that humans think imperatively, they are greatly oversimplifying things. Once I know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I'm not painstakingly walking through the steps in my mind in great detail in order to make one. All of that gets abstracted away into a series of composed actions that yield the same result in the end. And of course, at that point, the same process can be easily adapted with little effort to the creation of any type of sandwich. How is that not more analogous to a declarative/functional approach? I want to make a sandwich, so I make a sandwich. I don't explicitly tell myself "Okay, now remove the lid on the jar of peanut butter, now put the lid down on the counter, now grasp the jar in one hand and pick up the butter knife with the other." etc. Rich Hickey (the creator of Clojure) did a great talk called "The Value of Values" where he argued that imperative programming was, at one point, pretty much the only type of programming you could do if you wanted to make anything useful. Why? Because the hardware was so limited in resources that for any sufficiently important task, you had to build your mental model around those limitations. But as things have progressed, the situations in which that level of thinking is required has become more and more niche. He flatly acknowledges that if you're a systems programmer, or otherwise need to prioritize and optimize for performance, then obviously you still need to be engaging in what he calls "place oriented programming," e.g. a paradigm oriented around the manipulation of state. But for the vast majority of us, it doesn't currently make any sense, and introduces all sorts of problems that make our lives harder as programmers. And the main reason why we stick to this is because we began from a place of necessity, and then tricked ourselves into thinking it was actually the ideal way of doing things all along.
Monad and Product are related to the type system and not to functional programming. Functional programming languages (e.g. lisp) can also be dynamically typed.
I feel like a lot of people take a look at Haskell and think that it's representative of FP as a whole. It's really only Haskell (and it's offspring) that require a bachelors in category theory, lol. I mean, Clojure is just as functional as any other FP language and yet, it contains no algebraic data types at all.
I remember programming in 2009. I taught myself to code back then with bash scripting and C. I 'member loading Puppy Linux on a USB thumb drive in the school library to test some network sockets stuff. Good times, simpler times. I found very quickly that a basic-ish language called "AutoIt" was the fastest way to develop GUI apps on Windows, and I even was able to do TCP, UDP, keylogging, and a bunch of other stuff with it, too. I think at one point I even made a tool that would send screenshots across a LAN, though I never managed to optimize it enough to be anything close to real-time -- iirc I ran up against the limits of the language, then pivoted to the LAMP stack.
Some months ago I started to search about F#, as C# dev I was curious about that. Then I loved the concept about think in this functional way and also use composition to express real world models. But I figured out that probably F# wasn't a good choice, then I watched the your "ocaml... rust with garbage...." video and I loved because it combines all nice features that I saw in F# + and very powerful memory management, also I agree with you about something that have Rust best features but without the Foundation. I'm starting ocaml these days watching your live streams and also doing it by myself. Let's make ocaml popular !!!
@@scosminv I also didn't understand why the order of my project files influences on namespace resolution and it is very annoying. And ocaml looks funnier than F#. But I have interest in learn functional programming, I know that F# could be more useful since I'm C# developer. I also seen a lot of videos from Scott Wlaschin and also read his book about DDD with F#. But in my point of view the ecosystem behind F# is very strange and difficult. By the other hand with just some commands I was programming and following the ocaml getting started tutorials, while F# gives me a lot of confusion and I felt very lost.
@@adriancruz2822 function = some discrete entity in a language. functional programming = how you program; a programming paradigm. A programming paradigm has formal rules and definitions to program in a certain way. Languages have to support or provide certain features to allow you to code using a programming paradigm or allow you to program in a certain way. Just because a language has functions doesn't mean you can do functional programming in it (C is a good example).
it's confusing because people make blanket statements about what is or isn't functional programming - filter/map/reduce and functional composition are functional programming techniques, so you are "doing functional programming", how the hell else would you describe what you're doing? there are plenty of overlaps between most languages, and most popular languages today can be described as "multi paradigm" or "multi discipline" - you can practice or lean towards certain paradigms, techniques, or disciplines, in pretty much any mainstream language. You don't need to torture your brain with immutability and monads for 8 years in university before you're allowed to "do some functional programming". Just my opinion, but most of the purist FP languages aren't popular because they're too complicated and not very useful in practice. It's not an exclusive club - take what you can use, take what you like, and apply it where it makes sense. :-)
@@adriancruz2822 Imperative programming is oriented around telling the computer *how to* do X. Functional programming is oriented around *simply telling* the computer to do X. Map/filter/reduce are examples of how the raw details of iteration over collections get abstracted away under functional programming. You don't care about index variables or clever loop conditions. You just call map on a collection, pass in a function that will do Y to every element of the collection, and you're off to the races. Those higher-order functions aren't all there is to functional programming, but they're a good representation of the difference between it and imperative programming. FP tries to avoid digging into implementation details as much as possible. Rather, you just combine functions to produce the desired values.
OCaml absolutely deserves more attention. Fingers crossed! Haskell has a tendency to attract an insufferable set of people, which I'm getting tired of. It's like the BMW of programming languages :)
when people apply functional programming techniques (immutability, pure functions, functional composition, etc.) they're not "doing functional programming"? I mean, what else would you call it. I think we have to use that description, and I think purely functional programming languages should probably be qualified as "purely".
I think most of it here is very true e.g the reason why Javascript became popular was the frameworks like Node.JS, React and AngularJS and despite it not being a typical enterprise language and having strange rules. Typescript already tries to change this but in general it doesn't guaranty that your place is safe when strange things happens e.g Java . The reason it didn't apply for PHP back then it came with all it was meant for and also being the first language for webserver backend. Functional Programming I lernt it with Scala on my university I was horrible at it XD but I know why it is hard your function is basically your mathematically definition and instead of loop you use recursion. Scala is also OOP at the same time means doing mathematically definition and recursion on lists and objects. Its so strange and different from what you usually do as programmer its needs a complete different way of thinking. Its closer to writing a mathematically prof with Hoare logic that your program is correct.
I mean, you can write of functional programming in JavaScript, not everything, but you can have a core of your app that is functional. It just takes a little more effort since it doesn’t have the same features out of the box like a true functional language but it can be done.
C++ was the most popular language before Java and I don't think it ever had huge corporate backing. Objective-C (and really, even C#) never really came close to Java's level of popularity despite Apple (and Microsoft) being bigger companies than Sun. The two current most popular languages are JavaScript and Python, neither of which are really backed by specific corporations but rather embraced by then because they're already hugely popular. Honestly I think every single language that gets hugely popular gets there based on either killer apps or on solving specific shortcomings of the previous language without being too different. For C it was a killer app (Unix), for C++ it was higher levels of abstraction upon C, for Java it was (memory) safety over C++, for JavaScript it was a killer app (the web) and dynamism over Java, and for Typescript it's (type) safety over JavaScript. Perl, Python and Ruby are kind of exceptions in that they were just flexible enough to find different niches over time and accumulate popularity, although even then only Python seems to have survived the purge that was Node.js on all backend web languages, by finding a niche in data science and ml.
Clojure definitely seems to have these same problems. I've never met anyone who said it was their first language. Even with being built on the JVM (and thus having access to the entire Java ecosystem), and a lot of concessions to allow for more imperative styles of programming in a functional language, it remains consistently niche.
For embedded systems, the problem is not really processing speed, it is memory capacity. Yeah the processor is significantly slower, but you don’t want to dynamically allocate and free memory because you don’t have enough memory to allow the possibility of fragmentation and you don’t have virtual memory to help remove that problem with fragmentation.
12:35 I had to learn Java at university and oh god what a waste of life time that was. From a total beginner to whatever the hell I am now a decade later, my hatred for Java may be the only constant. We did C/++, Assembly, JavaScript, PHP, C# and a few other things here and there, and I enjoyed every single one of them more. I'd sooner do web dev in assembly than look at a Java project and wonder why the hell 90% of the program is running out of a config file rather than in actual code.
I despise Java. I was initially enthused about it when I saw it as a client side language for code that could be moved around the Internet easily. When it became the COBOL of the 2000s, I gave up on it. It amuses me that Javascript became the language for mobile code. I have some hopes for Web Assembly. So... Lua is used as a scripting language embedded in things. I think it's terrible for that for a variety of reasons. I'm a huge fan of Factorio, and it has an amazing modding system that I think is really hampered by the fact it uses Lua. If there were a nice way to use Web Assembly for stuff like that, it would be fantastic.
Procedural is not just how people think it's how the machine operates. Functional and logic programming are abstractions that have to constantly be translated back into how the machine operates. Some enjoy the added abstraction, some would rather deal with the machine directly.
The main reason why people hate functional programming is because of the difficulty to understand applicative order, recursion and lamda calculus after learning imperative programming (if you did not not touch recursion it is even worse) because the way of thinking changes. I know it well because they tried to teach me scheme after c, c++, c#,Java, python. Why do you do that to your student!!!! They told me how it is better to write functional programming and how the code is beautiful and short after passing hours and hours on imperative programming and oop. How do you want that I like the prefix syntaxe and all the parenthesis (if (= x 0) (do something) (else)). Variable are immutable what nightmare. They should first teach functional programming.
I really have to doubt the notion that people naturally think in 'procedural'. And even if true FP is way better for top-down and bottom up programming
There is a good comment there that definitely still applies - OCaml doesn't have a language spec, the compiler is the language spec. That means the language changes under your ass without warning in breaking ways regularly. Makes it hard to recommend over Haskell, Clojure, F#, CL unless your team is ass-deep in the compiler's guts the way the Jane Street folks are.
@@gamekiller0123 it's a bit different, when a language has a spec, the spec changes as the language evolves but it's a deliberate well-documented thing. When there is no spec, you have no real way to know whether some behaviour is an intended feature, unintended feature, or a bug, and it can change at any time in opaque ways. You're building on sand. That doesn't matter for hobby programming, but it does if you're making a product.
What's the difference between having a spec or not? If the spec is updated regularly you still have the problem. Or are you reading every update in a spec?
I agree 100% the elephant in the room is really that it's harder, just like Linux, Vim, Emacs, perhaps even Powershell? But you don't need to know what a Monad is though or be good at math. I think that is a myth. FP is inspired by lambda calculus and category theory/set theory but most of the academic stuff can really be dropped without any loss in expressiveness. If you do Haskell you however will need to learn to use monads, but most people already do use things like Optional, Async, Result and lists(yes lists are monads too) without knowing anything about category theory.
Programmed Haskell for a year back in 2017 when I was learning about FP. It's a cool language and makes me feel sophisticated but I moved onto more hands-on stuff like C and Zig. Elixir is my main driver now.
@@_orangutan My main Driver is Rust. I learned it after learning C and Haskell. I described it as the Haskell of C, for me it was such an amazing match between the two.
When talking about paradigms, as with language syntax, people just like what they're used to. In order to fully grok functional programming you need to unlearn and relearn so much, there's no other way but to bang your head against the wall a thousand times, just like you did when you learnt programming for the first time, it's just that people forget their struggles learning programming, because looking back everything was so simple. I saw this many times when I was a teacher. I don't think functional programming is so much harder than the imperative styles after seeing many good software engineers fail their first programming course at college the first time around... which is a whole semester's worth of classes just to talk about what for loops and if statements are
OCaml has historically had very bad tools for dealing with actually using the resources of the machine and has (as far as I know) had no answer to STM, lightweight threads, transactional variables and queues that build on top of these two things, which has made it hard to compete with Haskell which has had these for many years. So for someone actually working with these things, there just isn't that big of a space for OCaml to be the more appropriate choice. I've used OCaml in production a few times and it has always been a worse experience for solving real problems than Haskell because of a runtime that just doesn't provide modern facilities (see above) or even the comparatively poor level of the CLR which you get with F#. This probably made F# a much better choice than OCaml for our choices as well, in all likelyhood. It's funny seeing OCaml getting a resurgence because I suspect these things haven't actually been solved yet either. I'll go on record as saying that despite the low usage numbers of OCaml it's been my impression that it's vastly overrated by people who have never actually done anything in it, or lack experience with languages that provide better facilities. If I'm going to accept a barren runtime for efficiency's sake I'd take Zig or Odin any day since they're going to be better at providing a real, deterministic efficient experience anyway. The space that OCaml supposedly fills according to proponents is usually either wrong or basically useless since it's just the worst of all worlds.
Is SML/NJ still a thing? Back in the days it was better and more advanced than OCaml and it allowed you to write imperative code if you really wanted or needed to. One issue I have with Ocaml is that today languages need compiler support for concurrency or at least threads. Ocaml doesn't have that, like most other languages, if they have it at all (see Python) it is like a wart that was retrofitted as an afterthought.
OCaml 5 recently released with proper OS-level thread support, although parallel garbage collection is always tricky - at some point, the GC is going to have to pause all threads at once to make sure shared data structures are in sync, so it's usually best to communicate between threads with immutables and message passing to minimise the duration of the sync, and OCaml's message feature is marked as experimental. I'd much rather deal with haskell's transactional memory feature until that matures.
In 40 years, maybe. I don't think people realize just how much code is written in C++. These are not code bases you can rewrite when a new shiny comes along. For example Unreal is *millions* of lines of C++, and probably another million more for the GPU drives and drawing libraries. The game logic itself you can write in higher level languages.
@@kurt7020 You know zig support c/c++ you can call them to and from zig and also comes with tools to convert C/c++ to zig. Like unity before had JavaScript scripting and they decided to stop supporting that so they made a converter to convert js project to C# so is there a chance if you can just convert you c/c++ to zig. the main feature of popularity for rust is memory safety so is that much improvement of rust/zig worth the switch even with these converter
Experienced working programmers lose their minds when they have to drop a few SQL statements into their code. They aren’t going to latch on to OCAML, and neither will their managers.
wait, i have a usefull comment: the haskell sdl bindings make me want to go back to assembly language, they are so stars damn horrible. What the heck kinda function name is "$~!"?
Imo a big problem for Ocaml is that it is just getting native windows support this year. Ocaml hasn't really been able to create software for the most popular os for most of its life
Functional programming isn't "different from how people think," it's only "different from how students are set up for failure by current dogma-oriented teaching practices." Arguably functional models can encode logical structures like syllogisms, where procedural models either cannot or else require significant mangling to get there.
So people think naturally think in terms of higher order functions and monads? Why is it that 9 out of 10 FP evangelists can't even explain what a monad is?
@@isodoubIet Did you think each word in that response, decomposing to a code-point stream, each character individually assigned to a buffer position in your motor cortex, which were read out to your hands, governed by a mutex, for dispatch to each finger, governed by a separate mutex, to be input into the keyboard monolith (or microservice, if you use a split keyboard; possibly incurring race conditions if on a cheap membrane keyboard that can't handle more than 3 keypresses at once)? Personally, I think ideas in your head were resolved by something like a quantization or wave-function into specific words as encoded-meaning, which themselves were resolved as letters via spatial lookup, with motor-response->code-point hash function, ultimately resolved into a message which is compatible with your original meaning, but with an uncertain loss factor, depending on non-cooperative, shared memory, in something like a zero-trust encryption/compression scheme. I don't think formal, Functional Programming is natural, I don't think it's universally more efficient, and I don't think it works better for people that process language intended for computers according to a structure other than "FP". I absolutely mean "functional programming is closer to how you think"! This is not in the "You should be a functional programmer" way, but more in a "knock it off. You don't like it because it's unfamiliar, not because of any absolute advantage or disadvantage"
@@isodoubIet I think you are incorrectly conflating Haskell with functional programming as a whole. The are plenty of FP languages (like Clojure, for instance) that contain NO algebraic data types. As far as higher order functions go, are JS event listeners hard to understand?
I was in my last two years of undergrad in 2009, and used ocaml in some research/class projects by choice :) It’s a fun language, but haven’t used it in a long time. I think ReasonML could help because OCaml has some odd syntax.
It would be nice if it had type classes, things like /. because you can’t use the same operator for int and float types makes the syntax even more odd.
I wish there was a platform where everyone could code however they want with whatever logic or syntax makes them happy and it compiled to the same max performance code that works for everything. 🤣🤷♂
Ocmaml… never heard of it.
Ocmaml deez nutz
Tom the genius invented it
Ocaml… I fell asleep during class in CS
Ocmaml? I hardly know her.
Rust lang compiler was implemented in Ocaml
Most people don't actually understand OOP either, but they put it prominently on the resume and opine about it incessantly.
Luckily people giving the job interview also don't understand OOP. It's just 1 of those words that acts like a secret handshake, just like "clean code". I actuality read Uncle Bob's Clean Code and replied to a job interview that had clean code as requirement. They didn't know what function hoisting in js was so they were very confused at the fact that I was doing the Clean Code as instructed by the book. Which made me confused as to why they put Clean Code as a requirement to start with. Apparently they were talking about just basic indentation and naming variables somewhat sensible, this was a Medior position.
When you truly understand OOP, you throw it away.
Most people's version of "OOP" is just glorified procedural programming.
OOP certainly comes in handy. But for most projects, its best as a seasoning rather than the full meal.
@@IBelieveInCodePeople who "throw away" OOP don't understand it and are actually using it. OOP isn't classes and inheritance, it's design patterns and SOLID design principles. Unfortunately, most devs still don't know SOLID.
define "understand"
A University near me doesn't start with Python or Java, they start with Haskell.
w school
Haskell is so beatiful, until they start with the inscrutable terminology.
@@aoeu256a monad is simply a monoid in the category of endofunctors
I used to compare my workflow to yours thinking I was doing terrible because you don't look too old, then I realized you were already programming professionally when I was 7 and that kinda changes things lol
That's not what workflow means.
@@franciscoflamenco what do you think I meant by workflow?
Lol I had the same feeling when I compared myself with a 10+ yoe engineer with me being out of University
@@HoloTheDrunk Sounds like you're using it to mean career. If I was wrong then I apologize.
@@franciscoflamenco Don't turn this into reddit. Make your assumptions clear and then argue.
"If more people will write in OCaml then, people will write in OCaml more."
That's a good point actually.
And now I want to try to make a game with Raylib in OCaml lol
I work with a monolithic OCaml repository, and the answer is because the "O" stands for "Opaque"
FP checklist (if you haven't seen it yet):
- -20 years of Excel-
- some Lisp experience (idk which one tho)
- some Haskell-like experience (a day of Elm, then some PureScript, Haskell or Idris)
- some Erlang experience (probably Elixir)
wow never thought id see anyone delusional enough to call Excel a functional programming language. A day of elm != haskell "experience" either.
@@anon-fz2bo
Excel is the most popular purely functional language on the planet. Change my mind
(it even got =LAMBDA([p0, p1, …] ) recently)
Of course a day of Elm ain't Haskell. But it very quickly gives you a solid understanding of the basics. You can easily build a mental model for how evaluation works, understand why execution is just an implementation detail and so on. It's small (focused), well-documented and easily approachable. That's what matters for beginners. After a day or two, you can move on to the real deal.
You got shadowhammered btw
(had to jump through some YT hoops to see your reply)
Some years ago I started ocaml, but I went to Haskell and F# . But F# its basically ocaml with more stuff and other functionalities. Ocaml is so underrated like Erlang. Been doing lot of stuff with FP languages last years, and Haskell and F# are part of my life basically. I started with C , 28/30 years ago, still love C for sure 👌
I'm really happy that Elixir has somewhat brought up Erlang's goodness to the mainstream. Ditto for F# with OCaml.
@@franciscoflamenco totally follow you on that
@@franciscoflamenco even though Wolfram and APL still awesome tools
I love f#
F# is awesome. I wish learning resources were more plentiful and better designed, but I'll admit it's probably the language I'm most interested in picking up right now.
Reminds me that I often saw the claim that Java (with jit) can be as fast or sometimes faster than C or C++. Old days lol
Java with JIT can reach C like speed with 100x more memory
@@tokiomutex4148 And facing off against the C compilers at the time Java came out.
Not if you do True OOP™.
@@stevenhe3462 aka POOP
Marketing BS.
Java succeeded because Unis didn't want to pay for a compiler. It was free, .
Hard to believe this is the same person who hated on functional programming prior to looking at rust
A lot of people here are hating on abstractions. Even boolean algebra is not how the cpu works. There are millions of transistor connected in a manner to basic operations possible. So replicating that complexity everywhere would be stupid.
I never understood either. As far as FP languages go, OCaml is actually a fairly simple language too. It's orders of magnitude simpler than Haskell, Scala or Rust (if you count that as FP), which are all more popular.
I know Haskell has their little shadow existence but Scala always seemed obscure to me and what did Rust do to become popular?
Because rust isn’t FP…
@@AlJay0032 Rust isn't FP. It's a cleaner C++ with concepts from Haskell, but it's not designed to be used as a FP language. You can write some functional code with it, but that's really not what it's good at. Haskell had a lot of great ideas, people just overall kind of hate FP for doing real work.
@@taragnor It's not that people hate functional it's more than people aren't PHD mathemathicians.
@@elcugoim doing ocaml for my PhD. DAMMIT
Spot on! The first language I was exposed to was Basic on a Commodore64. Haskell is so hard for me I periodically pick it up and throw it away, yet it fascinates me.
Never tried Ocaml, but I remember learning Standard ML and thinking it was a masterpiece, so on the basis of this, I hope OCaml becomes more popular
I thought the same about Eff which is like OCAML with algebraic side effects, and LISP is standard ML but with macros, quote, and homoiconicity.
@@aoeu256 Hey, thanks for the reply! I'm not familiar with Eff, though that sounds interesting (need to look up what "algebraic side effects" are, though). Unfortunately, I constantly lament the fact that, as much as I love Lisp (I got pretty good at one point writing Emacs Lisp, though I admit my macro fu is weak), Lisp lacks something that I feel is one of the features I liked most about ML: its strong static type system. I sometimes wonder why they haven't come out with a Lisp that has this feature (or maybe that's just SML/OCaml/Scala etc., just sans macros).
Coq is built in OCaml. Maybe something to add to your list of deez-type jokes :3
I can't believe he forgot alerts.
I think the problem why Functional programming is less popular is in part that they don't have anyone like a Bob Martin (love him or hate him) out there trying to explain how to do it. It's always discussion on pure functions, and Monads and endofunctors and oh gosh i just want to know how to do this thing i know how to do proceduraly/imperativly.
Uncle Bob ist coming to the rescue. 😀 Google "Functional Design: Principles, Patterns, and Practices" from Robert C. Martin.
That’s why people should read grokking simplicity which does a really really good job at teaching functional programming without saying monad/functor and all of the seemingly scary stuff. Eric Normand always does a great job teaching in general…. A lisp programmer but this particular book uses JS to be friendly to everyone
If you want to learn FP without all these buzz words, just start with Elm
Bob Martin actually likes Clojure. But as someone that enjoys Clojure, I don't know what to think of that.
@@bobbycrosby9765 I love clojure as well....
When people say that humans think imperatively, they are greatly oversimplifying things. Once I know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I'm not painstakingly walking through the steps in my mind in great detail in order to make one. All of that gets abstracted away into a series of composed actions that yield the same result in the end. And of course, at that point, the same process can be easily adapted with little effort to the creation of any type of sandwich. How is that not more analogous to a declarative/functional approach? I want to make a sandwich, so I make a sandwich. I don't explicitly tell myself "Okay, now remove the lid on the jar of peanut butter, now put the lid down on the counter, now grasp the jar in one hand and pick up the butter knife with the other." etc.
Rich Hickey (the creator of Clojure) did a great talk called "The Value of Values" where he argued that imperative programming was, at one point, pretty much the only type of programming you could do if you wanted to make anything useful. Why? Because the hardware was so limited in resources that for any sufficiently important task, you had to build your mental model around those limitations. But as things have progressed, the situations in which that level of thinking is required has become more and more niche. He flatly acknowledges that if you're a systems programmer, or otherwise need to prioritize and optimize for performance, then obviously you still need to be engaging in what he calls "place oriented programming," e.g. a paradigm oriented around the manipulation of state. But for the vast majority of us, it doesn't currently make any sense, and introduces all sorts of problems that make our lives harder as programmers. And the main reason why we stick to this is because we began from a place of necessity, and then tricked ourselves into thinking it was actually the ideal way of doing things all along.
Monad and Product are related to the type system and not to functional programming. Functional programming languages (e.g. lisp) can also be dynamically typed.
I feel like a lot of people take a look at Haskell and think that it's representative of FP as a whole. It's really only Haskell (and it's offspring) that require a bachelors in category theory, lol. I mean, Clojure is just as functional as any other FP language and yet, it contains no algebraic data types at all.
@@BrianClark-gh1ms that's because it's garbage FP
I like how that entire exchange really foreshadowed Rust
I'm sticking with elixir as my go-to functional language
I remember programming in 2009. I taught myself to code back then with bash scripting and C. I 'member loading Puppy Linux on a USB thumb drive in the school library to test some network sockets stuff. Good times, simpler times. I found very quickly that a basic-ish language called "AutoIt" was the fastest way to develop GUI apps on Windows, and I even was able to do TCP, UDP, keylogging, and a bunch of other stuff with it, too. I think at one point I even made a tool that would send screenshots across a LAN, though I never managed to optimize it enough to be anything close to real-time -- iirc I ran up against the limits of the language, then pivoted to the LAMP stack.
Asking chatGPT to generate pythonautoit code or python shell code is what I do to automate stuff, and sometimes its even faster than navigating GUIs.
Some months ago I started to search about F#, as C# dev I was curious about that. Then I loved the concept about think in this functional way and also use composition to express real world models. But I figured out that probably F# wasn't a good choice, then I watched the your "ocaml... rust with garbage...." video and I loved because it combines all nice features that I saw in F# + and very powerful memory management, also I agree with you about something that have Rust best features but without the Foundation.
I'm starting ocaml these days watching your live streams and also doing it by myself.
Let's make ocaml popular !!!
I don't understand why choose ocaml vs F#. .NET supports AOT compilation nowadays, you can produce native binaries if that was your reason ...
@@scosminv I also didn't understand why the order of my project files influences on namespace resolution and it is very annoying. And ocaml looks funnier than F#.
But I have interest in learn functional programming, I know that F# could be more useful since I'm C# developer. I also seen a lot of videos from Scott Wlaschin and also read his book about DDD with F#.
But in my point of view the ecosystem behind F# is very strange and difficult. By the other hand
with just some commands I was programming and following the ocaml getting started tutorials, while F# gives me a lot of confusion and I felt very lost.
You should do a functional programming vs programming with functions video cause it really is confusing
A function is a unit of work that most programming languages have.
Functional programming is a paradigm like how OOP is a paradigm.
@@ItzAnameOkthat does not help
@@adriancruz2822
function = some discrete entity in a language.
functional programming = how you program; a programming paradigm.
A programming paradigm has formal rules and definitions to program in a certain way.
Languages have to support or provide certain features to allow you to code using a programming paradigm or allow you to program in a certain way.
Just because a language has functions doesn't mean you can do functional programming in it (C is a good example).
it's confusing because people make blanket statements about what is or isn't functional programming - filter/map/reduce and functional composition are functional programming techniques, so you are "doing functional programming", how the hell else would you describe what you're doing? there are plenty of overlaps between most languages, and most popular languages today can be described as "multi paradigm" or "multi discipline" - you can practice or lean towards certain paradigms, techniques, or disciplines, in pretty much any mainstream language. You don't need to torture your brain with immutability and monads for 8 years in university before you're allowed to "do some functional programming". Just my opinion, but most of the purist FP languages aren't popular because they're too complicated and not very useful in practice. It's not an exclusive club - take what you can use, take what you like, and apply it where it makes sense. :-)
@@adriancruz2822 Imperative programming is oriented around telling the computer *how to* do X. Functional programming is oriented around *simply telling* the computer to do X. Map/filter/reduce are examples of how the raw details of iteration over collections get abstracted away under functional programming. You don't care about index variables or clever loop conditions. You just call map on a collection, pass in a function that will do Y to every element of the collection, and you're off to the races. Those higher-order functions aren't all there is to functional programming, but they're a good representation of the difference between it and imperative programming. FP tries to avoid digging into implementation details as much as possible. Rather, you just combine functions to produce the desired values.
Clojure is a great language for getting into functional programming. It is the least complex of them all.
OCaml absolutely deserves more attention. Fingers crossed!
Haskell has a tendency to attract an insufferable set of people, which I'm getting tired of. It's like the BMW of programming languages :)
I know your pain. But it's not the languages fault. There are such people everywhere (except python)
On top of that, the library ecosystem is garbage
@@itellyouforfree7238 its gotten a lot better.
when people apply functional programming techniques (immutability, pure functions, functional composition, etc.) they're not "doing functional programming"? I mean, what else would you call it. I think we have to use that description, and I think purely functional programming languages should probably be qualified as "purely".
I think most of it here is very true e.g the reason why Javascript became popular was the frameworks like Node.JS, React and AngularJS and despite it not being a typical enterprise language and having strange rules. Typescript already tries to change this but in general it doesn't guaranty that your place is safe when strange things happens e.g Java . The reason it didn't apply for PHP back then it came with all it was meant for and also being the first language for webserver backend.
Functional Programming I lernt it with Scala on my university I was horrible at it XD but I know why it is hard your function is basically your mathematically definition and instead of loop you use recursion. Scala is also OOP at the same time means doing mathematically definition and recursion on lists and objects. Its so strange and different from what you usually do as programmer its needs a complete different way of thinking. Its closer to writing a mathematically prof with Hoare logic that your program is correct.
I mean, you can write of functional programming in JavaScript, not everything, but you can have a core of your app that is functional. It just takes a little more effort since it doesn’t have the same features out of the box like a true functional language but it can be done.
I would like to see some example of this actually
"Nobody understands why I language becomes popular" Because Java and C# didn't have huge corporate backing or something?
C++ was the most popular language before Java and I don't think it ever had huge corporate backing. Objective-C (and really, even C#) never really came close to Java's level of popularity despite Apple (and Microsoft) being bigger companies than Sun.
The two current most popular languages are JavaScript and Python, neither of which are really backed by specific corporations but rather embraced by then because they're already hugely popular.
Honestly I think every single language that gets hugely popular gets there based on either killer apps or on solving specific shortcomings of the previous language without being too different.
For C it was a killer app (Unix), for C++ it was higher levels of abstraction upon C, for Java it was (memory) safety over C++, for JavaScript it was a killer app (the web) and dynamism over Java, and for Typescript it's (type) safety over JavaScript.
Perl, Python and Ruby are kind of exceptions in that they were just flexible enough to find different niches over time and accumulate popularity, although even then only Python seems to have survived the purge that was Node.js on all backend web languages, by finding a niche in data science and ml.
Clojure definitely seems to have these same problems. I've never met anyone who said it was their first language. Even with being built on the JVM (and thus having access to the entire Java ecosystem), and a lot of concessions to allow for more imperative styles of programming in a functional language, it remains consistently niche.
Wasn't ReasonML supposed to be the modern take on OCaml?
ReasonML & OCaml are both OCaml under the hood, ReasonML just offers an alternative syntax but they’re the same
Ocmaml, love it
The first time I heard of Ocaml, it is in a conference presentation for a framework called Melange
Norman Ransey was my college professor. Crazy to see him here!
For embedded systems, the problem is not really processing speed, it is memory capacity. Yeah the processor is significantly slower, but you don’t want to dynamically allocate and free memory because you don’t have enough memory to allow the possibility of fragmentation and you don’t have virtual memory to help remove that problem with fragmentation.
12:35 I had to learn Java at university and oh god what a waste of life time that was.
From a total beginner to whatever the hell I am now a decade later, my hatred for Java may be the only constant.
We did C/++, Assembly, JavaScript, PHP, C# and a few other things here and there, and I enjoyed every single one of them more. I'd sooner do web dev in assembly than look at a Java project and wonder why the hell 90% of the program is running out of a config file rather than in actual code.
Did you know the Cambridge university teaches their whole CS course with OCaml instead of C?
Indeed, And they have the course and video lectures freely available online on their website and youtube.
That's good, because university is supposed to teach you how to study, reason, learn and think, not how to use a hammer
Never heard of ocaml until you mentioned it and I’m starting to consider it for new projects. Really think vite and reasonml could be something fun
I despise Java. I was initially enthused about it when I saw it as a client side language for code that could be moved around the Internet easily. When it became the COBOL of the 2000s, I gave up on it.
It amuses me that Javascript became the language for mobile code. I have some hopes for Web Assembly.
So... Lua is used as a scripting language embedded in things. I think it's terrible for that for a variety of reasons. I'm a huge fan of Factorio, and it has an amazing modding system that I think is really hampered by the fact it uses Lua. If there were a nice way to use Web Assembly for stuff like that, it would be fantastic.
It never ceases to amaze me when people claim a GC language can contend with C or C++. Member Go, D, and OCaml?
I think you can turn off GC in D, not sure tho
Procedural is not just how people think it's how the machine operates. Functional and logic programming are abstractions that have to constantly be translated back into how the machine operates. Some enjoy the added abstraction, some would rather deal with the machine directly.
The main reason why people hate functional programming is because of the difficulty to understand applicative order, recursion and lamda calculus after learning imperative programming (if you did not not touch recursion it is even worse) because the way of thinking changes. I know it well because they tried to teach me scheme after c, c++, c#,Java, python. Why do you do that to your student!!!! They told me how it is better to write functional programming and how the code is beautiful and short after passing hours and hours on imperative programming and oop. How do you want that I like the prefix syntaxe and all the parenthesis (if (= x 0) (do something) (else)). Variable are immutable what nightmare. They should first teach functional programming.
Any updates on if u will be continuing the "Writing An Interpreter In Go" book ?
I really have to doubt the notion that people naturally think in 'procedural'. And even if true FP is way better for top-down and bottom up programming
Procedural isn't just a list of things to do. Lists of things on a piece of paper generally don't include state.
There is a good comment there that definitely still applies - OCaml doesn't have a language spec, the compiler is the language spec.
That means the language changes under your ass without warning in breaking ways regularly.
Makes it hard to recommend over Haskell, Clojure, F#, CL unless your team is ass-deep in the compiler's guts the way the Jane Street folks are.
Doesn't Haskell have the same problem? They explicitly prioritize research and innovation over stability.
@@gamekiller0123 it's a bit different, when a language has a spec, the spec changes as the language evolves but it's a deliberate well-documented thing. When there is no spec, you have no real way to know whether some behaviour is an intended feature, unintended feature, or a bug, and it can change at any time in opaque ways. You're building on sand.
That doesn't matter for hobby programming, but it does if you're making a product.
@@Taverius What about Rust, which has no spec but prioritizes stability?
What's the difference between having a spec or not? If the spec is updated regularly you still have the problem. Or are you reading every update in a spec?
Can you explain more about spec you're talking about in business context? Or gimme some keyword for googling
I am newbie,
I agree 100% the elephant in the room is really that it's harder, just like Linux, Vim, Emacs, perhaps even Powershell? But you don't need to know what a Monad is though or be good at math. I think that is a myth. FP is inspired by lambda calculus and category theory/set theory but most of the academic stuff can really be dropped without any loss in expressiveness. If you do Haskell you however will need to learn to use monads, but most people already do use things like Optional, Async, Result and lists(yes lists are monads too) without knowing anything about category theory.
I don't think I could ever love Ocaml when I already know and love Haskell in terms of language design.
Programmed Haskell for a year back in 2017 when I was learning about FP. It's a cool language and makes me feel sophisticated but I moved onto more hands-on stuff like C and Zig. Elixir is my main driver now.
Did Prime ever try Haskell? What FP experiences does he have, or is OCAML going to be playing his V-card?
@@_orangutan My main Driver is Rust. I learned it after learning C and Haskell. I described it as the Haskell of C, for me it was such an amazing match between the two.
Isn't haskell just worse?
@@TheMrKeksLp in what way?
Because people like to learn with (good) projects, and there isn't many alternatives.
Prime, I know you’re seeing this. You should start a series where you look at code predictions from 10-15 years ago
finger blazingly fast, eyes can't keepup with word hes trying to type
When talking about paradigms, as with language syntax, people just like what they're used to. In order to fully grok functional programming you need to unlearn and relearn so much, there's no other way but to bang your head against the wall a thousand times, just like you did when you learnt programming for the first time, it's just that people forget their struggles learning programming, because looking back everything was so simple. I saw this many times when I was a teacher. I don't think functional programming is so much harder than the imperative styles after seeing many good software engineers fail their first programming course at college the first time around... which is a whole semester's worth of classes just to talk about what for loops and if statements are
I don't think Prime realizes that he has the influence to single-handedly make a language popular by continuing to talk about it
I tried installing Ocaml to learn rescript(better js). It was a pain.
OCaml has historically had very bad tools for dealing with actually using the resources of the machine and has (as far as I know) had no answer to STM, lightweight threads, transactional variables and queues that build on top of these two things, which has made it hard to compete with Haskell which has had these for many years. So for someone actually working with these things, there just isn't that big of a space for OCaml to be the more appropriate choice.
I've used OCaml in production a few times and it has always been a worse experience for solving real problems than Haskell because of a runtime that just doesn't provide modern facilities (see above) or even the comparatively poor level of the CLR which you get with F#. This probably made F# a much better choice than OCaml for our choices as well, in all likelyhood. It's funny seeing OCaml getting a resurgence because I suspect these things haven't actually been solved yet either. I'll go on record as saying that despite the low usage numbers of OCaml it's been my impression that it's vastly overrated by people who have never actually done anything in it, or lack experience with languages that provide better facilities. If I'm going to accept a barren runtime for efficiency's sake I'd take Zig or Odin any day since they're going to be better at providing a real, deterministic efficient experience anyway. The space that OCaml supposedly fills according to proponents is usually either wrong or basically useless since it's just the worst of all worlds.
Is SML/NJ still a thing? Back in the days it was better and more advanced than OCaml and it allowed you to write imperative code if you really wanted or needed to.
One issue I have with Ocaml is that today languages need compiler support for concurrency or at least threads. Ocaml doesn't have that, like most other languages, if they have it at all (see Python) it is like a wart that was retrofitted as an afterthought.
OCaml 5 recently released with proper OS-level thread support, although parallel garbage collection is always tricky - at some point, the GC is going to have to pause all threads at once to make sure shared data structures are in sync, so it's usually best to communicate between threads with immutables and message passing to minimise the duration of the sync, and OCaml's message feature is marked as experimental.
I'd much rather deal with haskell's transactional memory feature until that matures.
If you make OCaml popular, you are God!
Just with the name I am repelled but now that Prime is talking about it I’ll built something with it
is there a chance that game studios/indie dev/game engine will migrate/use rust or zig instead of c++
In 40 years, maybe. I don't think people realize just how much code is written in C++. These are not code bases you can rewrite when a new shiny comes along. For example Unreal is *millions* of lines of C++, and probably another million more for the GPU drives and drawing libraries. The game logic itself you can write in higher level languages.
@@kurt7020 You know zig support c/c++ you can call them to and from zig and also comes with tools to convert C/c++ to zig. Like unity before had JavaScript scripting and they decided to stop supporting that so they made a converter to convert js project to C# so is there a chance if you can just convert you c/c++ to zig. the main feature of popularity for rust is memory safety so is that much improvement of rust/zig worth the switch even with these converter
"The language that relies on dictironaries to get anything done is utter crap" -- > cries in python and c symbol tables.
Our college still teaches applets
ocaml had some serious leadership issues a few years back.
Ocmaml, a.k.a
Object
Coriented
Machine to
Artificial
Machine
Language
Objective Categorical Abstract Machine Language
why isnt caml more popular? (the og before ocaml)
I heard of OCaml long time ago when I was starting CS, what prevent me from studying it was the stupid name tho.
Ocaml goes to a school in Canada, you wouldn't undestaaaaand.
(pointless comment to boost engagement, sorry >.>)
12:57 Java applets were awesome! Basically Flash, except it’s Java! Basically like the HTML canvas, but Java! Can we still do applets?
you can do webassembly nowadays
yo, your title has a typo... ah nevermind.
Oooh 100 libraries!
please ask a dumb question on btc stack overflow, we need more entertainment over there
Experienced working programmers lose their minds when they have to drop a few SQL statements into their code. They aren’t going to latch on to OCAML, and neither will their managers.
ocmaml
I was programming since 1990 xD
wait, i have a usefull comment: the haskell sdl bindings make me want to go back to assembly language, they are so stars damn horrible. What the heck kinda function name is "$~!"?
The syntax of ocaml is good but the the developer tooling is
not dune and opam dont work toghether really well and there is not one standard library.
StackOverflow people will get you triggered and make it seem like it is your fault.
Maybe it's because state is not just "bad".
Hmmmm hard real time while garbage collected? Im not saying its not possible but im curious as to how?
Oh Cam Her? I barely know her
It would be more popular if it rebranded as Haskell++
Imo a big problem for Ocaml is that it is just getting native windows support this year. Ocaml hasn't really been able to create software for the most popular os for most of its life
Forget about the O in OCaml.
Functional programming isn't "different from how people think," it's only "different from how students are set up for failure by current dogma-oriented teaching practices." Arguably functional models can encode logical structures like syllogisms, where procedural models either cannot or else require significant mangling to get there.
So people think naturally think in terms of higher order functions and monads? Why is it that 9 out of 10 FP evangelists can't even explain what a monad is?
@@isodoubIet Did you think each word in that response, decomposing to a code-point stream, each character individually assigned to a buffer position in your motor cortex, which were read out to your hands, governed by a mutex, for dispatch to each finger, governed by a separate mutex, to be input into the keyboard monolith (or microservice, if you use a split keyboard; possibly incurring race conditions if on a cheap membrane keyboard that can't handle more than 3 keypresses at once)?
Personally, I think ideas in your head were resolved by something like a quantization or wave-function into specific words as encoded-meaning, which themselves were resolved as letters via spatial lookup, with motor-response->code-point hash function, ultimately resolved into a message which is compatible with your original meaning, but with an uncertain loss factor, depending on non-cooperative, shared memory, in something like a zero-trust encryption/compression scheme.
I don't think formal, Functional Programming is natural, I don't think it's universally more efficient, and I don't think it works better for people that process language intended for computers according to a structure other than "FP". I absolutely mean "functional programming is closer to how you think"! This is not in the "You should be a functional programmer" way, but more in a "knock it off. You don't like it because it's unfamiliar, not because of any absolute advantage or disadvantage"
@@isodoubIet You don't need to know what a monad is to use flatMap, do you?
@@isodoubIet I think you are incorrectly conflating Haskell with functional programming as a whole. The are plenty of FP languages (like Clojure, for instance) that contain NO algebraic data types. As far as higher order functions go, are JS event listeners hard to understand?
@@BrianClark-gh1ms I didn't even mention ADTs, I have no idea what you're talking about
I was in my last two years of undergrad in 2009, and used ocaml in some research/class projects by choice :)
It’s a fun language, but haven’t used it in a long time. I think ReasonML could help because OCaml has some odd syntax.
It would be nice if it had type classes, things like /. because you can’t use the same operator for int and float types makes the syntax even more odd.
more legend stack overflow please ...
ok mammal
Here are the reasons why OCamel isn't popular:
Has no x in the name.
Name is longer then one letter.
Name isn't related to coffee, islands or metals
OC MAML
I wish there was a platform where everyone could code however they want with whatever logic or syntax makes them happy and it compiled to the same max performance code that works for everything. 🤣🤷♂
Sounds like Haxe.
dotnet? it has f# and c# which both produce fast static binaries
Because syntax matters.
I'm still here writing JSPs at a trillion dollar company in 2023 :(
Ocmaml 💀
"I love dicts"
10:54 look at the message at the top lol
Leftpad will never not be funny
Ocaml mammal
Now it’s🫡
ock mammal
Ocmaml
there actually useful OCaml flavor called f#
look at the OCaml guy scared of Haskell talking down JS developers for thinking they are functional programmers