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Comment by misja111 | Hacker News Reader

I tried out OCaml last year for solving the AOC puzzles. I managed to solve all of them in earlier years using Haskell or Scala, but this was the first time I gave up. It was not as much the syntax, it was the schism between the OCaml standard libraries and those from Jane Street that turned me off. Whatever I was searching for on the Internet, resulted in a mix of links to either of those libraries. It was confusing and very frustrating.

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I get that. Having read Real World OCaml back when it was an O'Reilly book, I had a hard time not thinking Core was the defacto OCaml std lib. And its horrible documentation made me think the OCaml community was dead - or at least brain-dead. It appealed to one type of learner: Someone who just needs to see type signatures and has no interest in examples of how it could be used.

After reading OCaml From The Very Beginning my stance softened. Learning PURE OCaml is a must. (if you want to do AoC with it). You may find yourself bringing in Core or Base, after you've got a good idea of a solution.

It's definitely a fun language for doing AoC... but it can become extraordinarily frustrating when you hit a wall and all the StackOverflow answers assume Core.

Yup the thing that people recommending Jane Street libraries to newcomers don't realize is that they are made by and for a well-established team of OCaml developers who have been extensively trained in how to use it in Jane Street. Outside of the warm protective bubble of Jane Street's tribal knowledge, it's a more difficult task to pick up and understand their libraries with their often minimalistic documentation.

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