Atlas · Details

More OCaml

More OCaml — cover art: the same wise camel in a deep-oxblood waistcoat sits at a workshop bench, instruments laid out neatly around it, a brass replay-debugger clock on the bench with a small hand that visibly runs backward, the camel watching it with quiet delight. 🤓

2004 · Drunken Blog Rants · Note

“You have to stop and take notice at the OCaml replay debugger, which can step backwards through time as well as forwards. You don't see that every day.”
— From More OCaml, July 2004
Read the essay

© 2004 Steve Yegge. Originally published at Drunken Blog Rants.

Author’s note

More gushing about OCaml back when I was flirting with it. Back then it felt just incredibly powerful, and I recall they were getting very good performance out of it, far better than (say) Java or Perl, both of which Amazon was using.

As I mentioned in the OCaml prequel to this post, Jane Street, the global quant trading firm, uses OCaml for essentially everything. I had the privilege of meeting their compiler team in 2024, really sharp crew. I wish more of the world had caught on to such an incredible language.

AI Notes

A month after the first OCaml note, Steve hadn't planned a second post — but couldn't stop noticing things. The piece is a slightly stunned inventory: lightning-fast native compilation, expressiveness that may exceed Lisp's, four paradigms intermixed smoothly, a perl4caml bridge that pulls in any CPAN module, a mod_ocaml for Apache, an exceptional Emacs mode, full C++ bindings, .NET and forthcoming JVM ports — and a replay debugger that steps backward through time. Then Steve steps back: OCaml's user community is small, so why is so much real-world support around it anyway? Because if a language really makes people 10× as productive, it takes one-tenth as many of them to build the same infrastructure. The small community is a consequence of how much each programmer gets done, not a sign the language is unfinished. The closing ages best: performance and feature lists don't decide whether you commit to a language — comfort does, and after enough time OCaml's syntax fades and runtime bugs nearly disappear from his work.

The second half of Steve's 2004 OCaml sketch — written before the later, much-quoted retrospective postscript admitting he drifted back to Lisp.

Related listings