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Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

OCaml's community has always struck me as really toxic and hostile to newbies. If a newbie asks a question however politely, they're frequently berated as though asking for help is cheating and everyone should learn things the hard way as they did. Alternatively, if the community doesn't have a good answer (e.g., "How do I do X in OCaml?"), they often respond with some variation of "You're stupid for trying to do X" or "If Jane Street can make millions without X, then your company doesn't need it either!".

Of course, every community has some toxic members, but in my experience they are so pervasive in the OCaml community that it virtually characterizes the entire community. And I've heard every justification including "Everyone is mean to the OCaml community, so the OCaml community is mean to everyone else".

Anyway, I don't care to get into an argument about whether or not OCaml's community is toxic, I'm happy to agree to disagree.

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> Anyway, I don't care to get into an argument about whether or not OCaml's community is toxic, I'm happy to agree to disagree.

I'm not interested in arguing either, I was asking because I've been interested by OCaml for a long time and it's always nice to know in advance about broken stairs. Thanks for sharing.

That makes sense. My "I'm not interested in arguing" wasn't directed to you per se, but to any who might be interested in responding argumentatively.

And Americans often expect a ton of hand-holding. OCaml is a mature language with lots of relatively mature projects, tends to have a ton of documentation, etc...

Here's one of my favourite blog posts ever concerning open source and some expectations: https://www.catuhe.com/le-syndrome-du-puppy/

Hah, weird to make this nationalist. I studied at a top-tier French university without much hand-holding (and indeed tutored my French and English counterparts with their computer science lessons), but I guess I'm still not qualified to inquire of the OCaml community.

Thank you, however, for illustrating my point. :)

I've just heard every community described as 'toxic' and honestly 9/10 times I disagree.

> I've just heard every community described as 'toxic' and honestly 9/10 times I disagree.

That's pretty consistent with the "toxic community" hypothesis. I.e., people who are attracted to toxic communities think that others are too soft/welcoming, tolerate too much "hand holding", etc.

This is a disgusting kafka trap you just tried to stuff another person in by implying the only reason anyone could disagree with you is if they're an abuser. You can take this slimy behavior elsewhere and it only shows that your remarks about the OCaml community are suspect.

It's not a Kafka trap. I'm responding to the specific rebuttal "OCaml can't be toxic because I don't find it toxic" by explaining that there are a couple of possibilities:

1. I'm wrong and OCaml's community is great OR

2. The parent doesn't find the OCaml community to be toxic because he's attracted to toxic communities

I specifically didn't say that the parent was toxic, although I think his comments (including his flagged nationalist comment) speak for themselves.

> You can take this slimy behavior elsewhere

You created an account just to accost me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

3. onus probandi?

I haven't interacted with the ocaml community enough to form any opinion, but honestly "the toxic community hypothesis", as you put it, is intellectual garbage.

With the same reasoning, one could argue that yours is a textbook example of the "overly sensible guy hypothesis", which states that only unreasonably sensible people would complain about communities rather than adapt.

It's pretty obvious that toxic communities do exist, and the "overly sensible guy hypothesis" is nonsensical, but your demeanor is implying that the user you were responding to is himself toxic, which I don't find at all reasonable.

I suspect you mean “sensitive” and not “sensible”? In any case, I’m not that sensitive. I went through the mill 15-20 years ago when programming communities were quite a lot more hostile toward newbies (certainly “welcoming” was not something communities concerned themselves with). But I do have the good sense to know that this isn’t constructive. And anyway, if you (or whomever) think OCaml’s level of toxicity is roughly the sweet spot, why do you care if I disagree? Perhaps you think I’m overly sensitive, but it’s not like I’m going to lose sleep over it. :)

I don't participate in any communities except HN, but thanks for calling me toxic. Just an observation though. Reading docs, code examples and blogs is where I get info about languages.

I didn’t call you toxic, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28645997

This is not an "Americans" thing. This is about the community of programmers in general growing at a very fast rate, and many people not having formal education, and formal education not always giving people the real world skills they need.

It's true that OCaml is a mature language, it's also quite stable considering its age. It has lots of relatively mature project, but it's also missing some pieces that people expect from the ecosystem of a language (the "recent" post about Darklang moving away from it because of a lack of Google Cloud libraries is an example of that).

"tends to have a ton of documentation" is wrong though. OCaml users are not blind to their own flaws, and often point out themselves that the documentation of most libraries is basically "look at the code".

About the blog post you posted, I think you're misinterpreting what people say. It's not about asking the OCaml community to put in even more work than they already did. They don't owe me anything. They don't owe a new user anything. That's a fact. However, when you're picking which language/ecosystem to invest time in, you're going to compare them. And when comparing them, you'll see that other ecosystems may have more libraries, libraries of higher quality, better documentation and/or more help for beginners. Just like the OCaml community don't owe us/me anything, I don't owe them anything and I'm free to chose whatever aligns the best with my interests.

What you interpret as "expecting a ton of hand-holding" is actually "being explicit as to why you choose something else than OCaml". You could then argue that OCaml users don't even want us and that saying this is useless. But that's not true. Here's an example of a subject in the official OCaml forum where they actively express their want for new users: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/expanding-ocaml-appeal-to-future....

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