OCaml, Batteries Included presentation [pdf]

forge.ocamlcore.org

4 pointsjonasb2 comments

The presentation isn't as long as the slide count makes it out to be; each transition (such as adding a bullet point to a list) gets its own slide. So even though it's 127 pages, you can read through it in 10 minutes.

The meat of it doesn't start until slide 35. Everything before that is motivation for the project, which is improving the library and syntax of OCaml.

Did anyone else find the proposed syntax Python-y? I actually think that's a good thing, as it's expressive. But even the name ("Batteries Included") makes me think of Python, as Guido famously considers Python a language with the batteries included.

(Disclaimer: I'm making my way through the OCaml tutorial (http://www.ocaml-tutorial.org/), so I don't even qualify as a OCaml newbie since I've never written a line of OCaml code. But I will seriously consider it for my next systems programming project, since it seems to occupy the intersection of functional, expressive and low-overhead.)

Yes, it's clear that this project was inspired by Python. In the presentation's language comparison, Python is the overall winner. If they can combine the best aspects of Python with C-like performance, more power to them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com