OCaml And Advent of Code?!? Day 01

Thanks, let me know what you think!

#adventofcode #aoc #nvim #ocaml #programming

[WillEhrendreich]

So happy to see you on ocaml, because my favorite Lang is FSharp and ocaml was an inspiration for Don Syme for creating FSharp. =) type inference is a Godsend. Simple, concise, clear code with so little boilerplate to get real things done. So awesome.

[goosechaser]

Am also doing some of the challenges in ocaml, cool to see you are too!

[architbhonsle]

For anyone having trouble understanding what's going on here, "list" is a linked list (I think) and "::" allows you to pluck out the first element of the linked list.

At least that's what I think is going on. I have no idea of OCaml works but this seems to make sense.

[cattohappy]

I could just sit there and even watch TJ talking about dolphin's sexuality and I would enjoy it as well.

Jokes aside, recently I took a Programming Language class which also teaches Ocaml, but even though it is beautiful the standard library felt lacking to me, i.e.
I couldn't find any "standard" way to read a file or iterate through its lines, I had to write it on my own, or the string library is a bit hard to work with, and I had to convert it to List of characters most of the times.

Probably I was and still missing something about Ocaml and Functional Programming in general, and online I couldn't find any good resources apart from some articles from realworldocaml and Michael Ryan Clarkson's fantastic videos, but compared to F# I really prefer the latter as dev experience.

[JakobKenda]

I feel like learning Rust really helped me with understanding this video.I watched it when it came out and didn't understand a thing but now I think I do because Rust is half functional.
It's the `C++ -> Rust -> OCaml` pipeline for me.

[pinkorcyanbutlong]

this video appeared weirdly in time with when I just started learning OCaml

[cyprienh]

I study in France, ocaml is the language taught in schools (with C)

[jrmoulton]

Haha great to have the interaction with flip!

[abdellahcodes]

Nice video!
Curious about the syntax highlighting for a single line vs the whole file, is that done at the neovim level or whole editing the video?

[simondebevoise]

one nice thing that you can do to avoid lost of nested parens is to use the pipe operator, like so:

let () =
group result []
|> max_of_list (* if you rewrote max of list to take one arg *)
|> string_of_int
|> print_endline
;;

[spaghettispaghetto]

Great vídeo, I've never tried Ocaml before and this gives me a strong grasp of it. Bye the way, I'm curious what's the app you're using as a whiteboard? Looks neat.

[Zzznmop]

Teej got that big big energy right now. Love to see it

[billeterk]

Very reminiscent of my uni course (‘96). We started with Miranda.

[Danielo]

Can believe you use a proper keyboard and a proper language. I'm impressed

[dimensionaldot]

Just left a long comment with some OCaml tips to make the code you wrote a bit more idiomatic. Seems to have gotten deleted (maybe because I included a link?). Hopefully you can revive it because I'd really like to not type all that out again, but if you can't please let me know

[fredfred]

You can write max_of_list = List.fold_left max 0

[alekseiabakumkin]

This reminds me of times when I played with LISP :)

[marcoradocchia]

Beautiful video! Just one curiosity: suppose the second part of the problem asked to find the top n values, with n arbitrarily large (but meaningfully smaller than the lenght of the list). Is the method you used (and which I really enjoyed) scalable in a sense that does not require you to write all the n cases? Also I'm wondering: as n approaches the lenght of the list does this just become a sorting algorithm?
P.S.: my questions might be dumb... if so, I'm sorry but I'm not an expert in algorithms, although I really enjoy the subject.

[nachiketkanore]

What tools do you use to write on screen like scratchpad?

[notAGreatGamer]

How did you get the code to highlight selectively?