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The more I used ocaml the more I found beauty in the syntax. It’s very ergonomic in many ways: 1. It’s whitespace insensitive, which means I can code something

The more I used ocaml the more I found beauty in the syntax. It’s very ergonomic in many ways: 1. It’s whitespace insensitive, which means I can code something up really messy and the code formatted will automatically fix it up for me. 2. In general there aren’t a ton of punctuation characters that are very common, which is great for typing ergonomics. Don’t get me wrong, there are still a lot of symbols, but I feel compared to some languages such as Rust, they’re used a lot less. Beyond the syntax, there are a couple of things I really like about the language itself: 1. Due to the way the language is scoped, whenever you encounter a variable you don’t recognize, you simply have to search in the up direction to find its definition, unless it’s explicitly marked as “rec”. This is helpful if you’re browsing code without any IDE tooling, there’s less guessing involved in finding where things are defined. Downside: if the “open” keyword is used to put all of a module’s values in scope, you’re usually gonna have a bad time. 2. The core language is very simple; in general there are three kinds of things that matter: values, types, and modules. All values have a type, and all values and types are defined in modules. 3. It’s very easy to nest let bindings in order to help localize the scope of intermediate values. 4. It has a very fast compiler with separate compilation. The dev cycle is usually very tight (oftentimes practically instantaneous). 5. Most of the language encourages good practice through sane defaults, but accessing escape hatches to do “dirty” things is very easy to do. 6. The compiler has some restrictions which may seem arcane, such as the value restriction and weak type variables, but they are valuable in preventing you from shooting yourself in the foot, and they enable some other useful features of the language such as local mutation.

bloomingkales 2y ago
2. In general there aren’t a ton of punctuation characters that are very common, which is great for typing ergonomics. Don’t get me wrong, there are still a lot of symbols, but I feel compared to some languages such as Rust, they’re used a lot less. I never really seen someone put that into words. I always feel a certain kind of weird when I look at a language with tons of punctuation (Typescript is good example).
- akkad33 2y ago
  The lambda syntax and default lambda parameters alone make typescript very hard to parse
- seanwilson 2y ago
  I think typing ergonomics are overlooked as well. CSS has the most verbose syntax for variables I've had to use regularly e.g. `var(--primary-color)` which I find unpleasant to type when experimenting. And I actually like the lack of brackets and commas in OCaml for function e.g. you write `add_numbers 1 2` instead of `add_numbers(1, 2)`. Brackets and commas in particular require you to navigate left/right a lot to add them in the right place while iterating and give confusing errors when you get them wrong. Would be curious if there's work into a programming language that was optimized for minimal typing while iterating.
  - ttepasse 2y ago
    Tangentially there is room for optimizing for non-american keyboards. The accent grave (backtick) you're using in a Markdown-inspired way is utterly annoying to type on keyboards where accents are implemented as dead keys, to be combined with vowels, common on european keyboard layouts. For your example I had to type `, but then look ahead to the a of add_numbers and remember to put in an extra space, so that the ` and the "a" don't combine to an "à". Also I find it somewhat illogical: The usage of an accent as a character in itself in programming languages is one of my pet peeves. Just being an ASCII character is not reason good enough to keep using it. Curly or square brackets, backslashes and other stuff also put you into uncomfortable AltGr or Cmd-Shift territory on some keyboards. American language designers are often blind for these simple ergonomics.
    - JadeNB 2y ago
      > The accent grave (backtick) you're using in a Markdown-inspired way is utterly annoying to type on keyboards where accents are implemented as dead keys, to be combined with vowels, common on european keyboard layouts. … Also I find it somewhat illogical: The usage of an accent as a character in itself in programming languages is one of my pet peeves. Just being an ASCII character is not reason good enough to keep using it. I understand that keyboards behave as they behave, and saying that "well they shouldn't" isn't a real answer. But I also think that it's not true that the backtick character is an accent grave, even if it is treated like one, any more than any other pair of Unicode homoglyphs are the same.

bloomingkales 2y ago

2. In general there aren’t a ton of punctuation characters that are very common, which is great for typing ergonomics. Don’t get me wrong, there are still a lot of symbols, but I feel compared to some languages such as Rust, they’re used a lot less. I never really seen someone put that into words. I always feel a certain kind of weird when I look at a language with tons of punctuation (Typescript is good example).

akkad33 2y ago
The lambda syntax and default lambda parameters alone make typescript very hard to parse
seanwilson 2y ago
I think typing ergonomics are overlooked as well. CSS has the most verbose syntax for variables I've had to use regularly e.g. `var(--primary-color)` which I find unpleasant to type when experimenting. And I actually like the lack of brackets and commas in OCaml for function e.g. you write `add_numbers 1 2` instead of `add_numbers(1, 2)`. Brackets and commas in particular require you to navigate left/right a lot to add them in the right place while iterating and give confusing errors when you get them wrong. Would be curious if there's work into a programming language that was optimized for minimal typing while iterating.
- ttepasse 2y ago
  Tangentially there is room for optimizing for non-american keyboards. The accent grave (backtick) you're using in a Markdown-inspired way is utterly annoying to type on keyboards where accents are implemented as dead keys, to be combined with vowels, common on european keyboard layouts. For your example I had to type `, but then look ahead to the a of add_numbers and remember to put in an extra space, so that the ` and the "a" don't combine to an "à". Also I find it somewhat illogical: The usage of an accent as a character in itself in programming languages is one of my pet peeves. Just being an ASCII character is not reason good enough to keep using it. Curly or square brackets, backslashes and other stuff also put you into uncomfortable AltGr or Cmd-Shift territory on some keyboards. American language designers are often blind for these simple ergonomics.
  - JadeNB 2y ago
    > The accent grave (backtick) you're using in a Markdown-inspired way is utterly annoying to type on keyboards where accents are implemented as dead keys, to be combined with vowels, common on european keyboard layouts. … Also I find it somewhat illogical: The usage of an accent as a character in itself in programming languages is one of my pet peeves. Just being an ASCII character is not reason good enough to keep using it. I understand that keyboards behave as they behave, and saying that "well they shouldn't" isn't a real answer. But I also think that it's not true that the backtick character is an accent grave, even if it is treated like one, any more than any other pair of Unicode homoglyphs are the same.