Hacker News

An ML is great for the theory or abstraction side of programming, but C is also hands down the best language to get a sense of how the computer is running your program.

It’s still an abstraction, but at least being aware of memory management, copying vs referencing, etc are hugely important concepts that ML languages can hide.

The entire series of interviews with various language designers by Ryan Peterman is really great and a highly recommended watch.

It gives an insight into how they thought/think and what we can learn from them.

While watching the series i was stuck by the fact that they often only focused/reiterated the conceptual basics and building on top of them in a step-by-step manner. Whereas if you watch interviews with programmers (even famous ones) you will often see a lot of fancy talk about the complicated features of the language etc.

I believe "Experts" have a way of modeling domain knowledge in their mind in such a way that they intuitively know what is the "wheat" and what is the "chaff". This is what we need to learn. Scheme can do a lot with a minimal language and so can C++ on the other end of the spectrum. So then what constitutes "Programming"? It is simply an expression of Intent via syntax supporting abstraction of state/behaviour.

I did so! (quirks of the path I took in the French educational system)

I went through a book similar to the one above, with no internet connection. The first few weeks were rough: I did not quite know what a type was and the compiler error messages were unforgiving and hard to understand without that context. But, once I grokked the core ideas (a proper idea of what could be done with recursion took much longer), things went surprisingly smooth. I definitely credit it with making me a better programmer.

When I first learned to program at university we were taught Haskell. That was 15 years ago and I've not really programmed anything in Haskell since, instead I've racked up years coding professionally in pretty much all the major imperative languages.

I'm aware of why Haskell is not practical as a production language for most companies, but I have to say I've never really coded in anything else that feels as "neat" and it's a shame. Every other language feels like it has some idiosyncratic scaffolding one has to learn, reminding you that you're constrained by how computer hardware works, rather than just expressing an algorithm in terms of inputs and outputs.

I would say it has made me a better coder, I've still kept a preference for keeping data immutable, copyable and abstracting complexity into easily testable functions over classes with unobservable mutable state.

It's a good language to learn programming. Very simple semantics. But ultimately, you need to learn different paradigms, I think the order doesn't matter, they'll still be an element of surprise.

Also OCaml lets you write imperative code if you wish so. So you can learn the different paradigms within the same language.

Ooooh, the memories...

Caml was how I was taught computer science in prépa and first few years of engineering school, a mere 25 years ago.

(Ok, I had done bits of BASIC before, but I had time to recover.)

To be honest, the learning path was

1. Lots of maths. Then add some more.

2. Algos in pseudo code. (In "French", pseudo code, of course, because, why not ?)

3. Caml as "executable pseudo code". With all the warnings and a hints of disgust as the use of mutation and side effect. (And of course ":=" his completely different from "=", what are we, beasts ?)

4. Lots of exams where you have to write properly indented programs on paper on the first try to submit all sorts of recursive trees to all sorts of horrendous manipulations - and you can imagine the grader doing the mother of all code reviews

5. Re do that again in engineering school, because a third of the class had done zero computer science, and the other third had learn in Pascal

6. Then learn C and assembler, and get your mind blown in the exact opposite direction

7. See your teachers reluctantly say that "you should just learn java", because "that's what used in the industry", and "no one will ever get a job writing caml anyway"

...

25 years later : yup, some people managed to get jobs writing a dialect of caml for this small startup in a garage serving cat pictures and racist memes to billions of people

26 years later: "you should just learn to prompt LLMs anyway", because "that's what the industry needs, and no one will get a job programming any more"

Being a functional programmer in a group of imperative programmers is miserable

This mindset (i.e. LLMs are available so why do i need to learn anything?) is highly insidious and will destroy your brain/mind/future if you let it.

Humans are the ones who Understand, while LLMs only Know.

So inter-disciplinary/cross-disciplinary insights, new modes of thinking/reasoning, flashes of insight etc. are still in the purview of Humans only. AI/LLMs can help focus and short-circuit the study of various subjects but their understanding can only happen within a human "Mind". If you do not even have basic domain knowledge (i.e. unknown unknowns) how can you even prompt/query an LLM for answers?

A few illustrative examples; a) Newton came up with limits/calculus out of a need to measure continuous motion with varying speeds b) Kekule came up with the benzene ring from a dream where he saw a snake grab its own tail c) Descartes came up with the cartesian coordinates in an attempt to solve geometry via algebra etc. Each of these was a novel leap of insight bringing together various concepts to create entirely new knowledge domains.

So one should learn/study the core concepts/ideas in various domains and then push the tedious mechanical labour onto the machines. In this regard see also the concept of "Active Learning" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_learning

You can also learn for your own amusement, and solely for the fun of comprehension; a lot of mathematician were driven by this. It's a shame current social value places so much utilitariaism on learning.

My experience with OCaml has transformed how I think about programming and complex system design. This may also be true if you learn any other functional programming language, but OCaml is easy and flexible which makes it good imo as a door towards the more formal part of comp sci. Even for steering an LLM I think this might help.

Michael Clarkson teaches OCaml at Cornell. I highly recommend his free course materials [1]. He’s an excellent educator. Learning functional programming paradigms had a major influence on how I design programs. Clarkson also taught snippets from the Pragmatic Programmer, which was equally influential (as it has been for many many others) [2].

[1] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs3110/2025sp/

[2] https://pragprog.com/titles/tpp20/the-pragmatic-programmer-2...

You could have asked this question 10 years ago, long before llms. It's not like you'd realistically would get an ocaml job back then when there's so few of them, so why bother?

The answer is still the same as well, people learn ocaml either because they enjoy it, or because learning a functional language makes them a better programmer overall and teaches your brain to approach a problem in a different way.

Outsourcing all the thinking to machines may have consequences you might not like.

An oblique explanation: https://croissanthology.com/earring

Posting 'why should we learn' a programming language on Hacker News is top-quality ragebait :-D

Should you learn history if it is already written in a book? Should you live if others are already living?

> So (asking genuinely), should we learn these things?

I wanted to learn a functional programming language with powerful type capabilities and I chose the Lean Language for that and not OCamel or Haskell. Reason being: Better type system (dependent types!), applicable in formal domains and can use it to learn math too.

For your bread and butter programming, there is already JS/Go anyways.

So don't see much point in learning OCamel.

Why learn an instrument when you can just press play?

Seeing that you already know programming, I'd say it'd be less risky for you. But the only reason you're able to pilot an LLM to do programming for you, is because you understand programming and architecture.

But what about the future generations skipping the step of learning the OCaml's, the C's, the Python's...? It's quite concerning.

Oh by the way, yes. Learn OCaml!

Keep using your brain or you will forget stuff. Doing puzzles is great, programming in new languages is also great.

you are eventually going to have a very bad time if you do not have a solid mental model of the code the LLM is writing, and indeed if you cannot steer the LLM so that its code conforms to your mental models. learning ocaml is a great way to add some valuable tools to your toolkit when it comes to thinking about code and how it fits together.

LLM + static types is a winning combo. And if you want to be serious with what you do with your LLM, you need to understand the output to some extent.

That being said, you may as well use Rust. The extra complexity of manual memory management and Rust idiosyncracies are easily dealt with by the LLM.

LLMs are better at OCaml than any other language, and being able to read and think in OCaml is very helpful to understanding LLM generated OCaml code.

Also, it may very well be the decade of formal verification - if so, OCaml is a good place to be.

I would sharpen my software engineering skills rather than coding / programming skills.

Yes. LLMs do not know anything, and they will make mistakes as a result. You have to be able to check their work if you wish to do a good job.

I think it's helpful to have a deep understanding of one c-type language, one lisp, and one ML-type language. There are so many things influenced by these three language families that being comfortable with them makes it so much easier to understand a wide variety of languages and libraries.

LLMs know it anyways?

Hhhmmmmm

I mean if you want to let llms do everything for you go ahead. Wall-e implications aside, it seems like a great self centric life.

I would not make that dependent on LLMs. If OCaml covers a use case you have, why not.

Personally I try to stick within my own niche though - ruby, java and also python (ruby is unfortunately losing grounds really hard now, the writing was on the well in the last some years though, and people such as DHH are now indeed a liability rather than an asset to be had, but that's a side topic).

I think what LLMs will force in the long run is to make programming languages used by real humans in a traditional way, more effective. That is, writing code by humans will have to become a lot more efficient, both time-wise and speed-wise. And for that there is always a use case IMO since LLMs are, despite the promo, incredibly stupid.

What the hell else do you have to do?!

Yeah, I don’t think it assumes zero knowledge, which is what I’d expect from a “first programming language” book.

But it does say it’s targeted more for an “algorithms” course in the introduction.

As a side note, I think a REPL is the best environment for learning to program for absolute beginners. You get instant feedback and can focus entirely on just short snippets of real code, without having to worry about compilers, build systems, and “the OS” as a whole. Especially if it comes with a GUI wrapper, you can skip the terminal entirely.

https://github.com/sanette/bogue

What language and framework do you use for GUI programming?

Camlkit-gui for macOS

The ePub contains both SVGs and PNGs, the latter of which doesn't compress all that well for "plain zip", which an ePub is.

The PDF on the other hand gets to use zlib for streaming all the objects. It gets half decent compression.

Probably vector-drawn diagrams are rendered into bitmap images for the EPUB version.

Ocaml is ancient at this point. It's never going to be python, but I doubt it's going to disappear.

Two genuine questions. (1) Why not Rust? (2) Why not Haskell?

(I have my own answers, but I'd love to hear yours, too.)

For web frontend, it's derivative programming language, rescript, is also a secret weapon because of types, fast compilation times and first class support of React. Using React in rescript is much nicer than TypeScript.

Did you also compare F#?

Couldn't agree more. Even when the models could barely write it, the compiler was so good

Flamebait aside, has this been studied for real ? Curious how you would rate that...