8 months of OCaml after 8 years of Haskell in production

If we are comparing succinctness, let me offer an alternative parsing example :-)

let parse_line line =
  Scanf.sscanf line "Status: %d | Result: %d" (fun status result ->
    if status = 0 && result mod 2 = 0 then Some result else None)

To.ml: A TOML parser

I was so infuriated by that library that I made one to fix all its problems. ;)
github.com/dmbaturin/otoml/

It's actually compliant with the TOML standard, uses transparent types (but also offers helpers for getting nested values), and uses functors to allow the user to plug any datetime and bignum libraries or stick with built-in native int and string dates.
Well, and offers informative parse errors, too.

I follow you on twitter and saw your recent posts about ocaml, so I decided to actually try it out. Using it for a bit during the holidays made me feel like it's just worse Haskell. When I saw your post, I thought that I'd see some features that are amazing, while it might just be my viewpoint, the stuff you're showing me here makes me want to use Haskell even more.
Less than language features a few of the libraries are really cool tho. I'd love to have something akin to owl (cl.cam.ac.uk/~lw525/owl/chapter/pl...)

You forgot the best asset OCaml which is its Web framework. Ocsigen is the most advanced web development framework. It's revolutionary once you get how it works. Nothing else can compete, in any language.

Awesome post!

I tried OCaml many years ago. I think around the same time I started playing with Haskell, but gave up on OCaml due the fact that Haskell felt more pleasant to use. You definitely made me wanna try OCaml again :)

I received tons of feedback on my OCaml vs Haskell blog post! Thanks a lot to all who read and shared their thoughts 🤗

Using the feedback, I improved my post by:

✍️ Changing the most triggering exponentiation example to a different one
✍️ Added links to all discussions of my blog post all around the Internet
✍️ Changed feature from 'Laziness by default' to 'Composable laziness'
✍️ Added 'topiary' as an OCaml formatter
✍️ Changed the suggested TOML library from 'To.ml' to 'otoml'
✍️ Changed the suggested AWS library from 'ocaml-aws' to 'awsm'

Hope you enjoy it!

Terrific post!

For the comparison table, possibly include records support. This has been a Haskell deficit for decades, and no thank you, lenses are a bloated, heavyweight bolt-on when you just want simple, lightweight record support.

Nice article. It's great to have the two languages side by side as I'm tempted to have a closer look at OCaml.

Great article! Really nice to see you're enjoying OCaml, I've been looking at it too, but have not actually used it yet, but this makes me even more interested in trying it out.