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Comment by the_clarence | Hacker News Reader

Worked on an ocaml codebase for two years. My advice is: choose a different language. It's just not a great dev experience in general

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> Worked on an X language codebase for two years. My advice is: choose a different language. It's just not a great dev experience in general.

I'm pretty sure it's "working on a codebase" that kills your soul, not the minutae of particular language choice.

Depends on what you compare it with, I guess. (I worked in OCaml and Haskell and other 'weird' languages professionally in different jobs for many years.)

Fsharp is pretty good in teams f tooling at least when compared to other functional languages

Although I'm not a Microsoft fan, their docs for F# are worlds ahead of anything I've seen for OCaml (I know a few OCaml folks are working to fix this).

I've considered trying it for Advent of Code this year.

It's definitely worth it to try

Please give it a try! And perhaps it catches your eye enough - it could use contributors too.

(also: generally speaking the "core" of .NET is quite unlike most other products Microsoft puts out, so chances are you will be pleasantly surprised)

Curious to know more, do you think can make a long-form of "why" and a detailed experience? If you have some time, would be massive to compare it with what's the same experience today

I also worked on an ocaml codebase for a roughly similar time frame and found it extremely pleasant. Probably the best time I spent as a dev with working on an Ada project with a great architecture.

What were the main issues you came across? What language would you prefer if you had to start from scratch and had the choice to go with anything else?

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