Is OCaml the "Go" of Functional Programming Languages?

• ocaml

  64 3,867 9.9 OCaml

  The core OCaml system: compilers, runtime system, base libraries

  

  I'm a go developer who started learning ocaml roughly a year ago and I've fallen in love with it. I'be tried a couple of fp languages before. They've never clicked with me but ocaml did. I don't blame the other languages tho as it's because of the excellent course cs3110 by Michael Clarkson why it finally clicked. Ocaml still has a lot of sharp edges especially in terms of tooling, up to date "best practices" etc which is surprising for how old ocaml already is. But something is happening within the ocaml community. Amazing libraries are popping up left and right and you can feel how this mature language with its small community is just a couple of small steps away from gaining way more adoption. Just today the new ocaml.org launched. I'd say now is the time to join the ocaml community.

• reason

  15 9,671 6.0 OCaml

  Simple, fast & type safe code that leverages the JavaScript & OCaml ecosystems

  

  Just one tip: if you have any trouble with ocaml , the language has an alternative syntax made by Facebook called ReasonML that aims to make the language easier for people coming from other languages. This helped me a lot when I was learning ocaml.

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• Elixir

  47 20,388 9.8 Elixir

  Elixir is a dynamic, functional language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications

  

  If you want a more quantified comparison, here is Elixir's parser, and here is OCaml's. Removing a lot of the function definitions that are left in ocaml's parse file, we can still see that Elixir's syntax is about a third of Ocaml's. For reference, Java would be about twice as much as OCaml's. Elixir does have some sugar on top of things that might not be necessary, e.g. sigils for strings and so on, but if you compare core elixir to core ocaml (or most other functional languages), or you compare full Elixir to full OCaml, you see that it's a smaller language. And to me, it provides overall a very Go-like experience.

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