Am 17.04.2017 um 21:26 schrieb David McClain:
And BTW… the breakthrough had absolutely nothing to do with typing and type inference. The success arose because of clean versus unclean control-flow. So you could say that OCaml adhered to “Structured Programming” in a better manner, which corresponds entirely to a fad cycle 2 layers back in time.
That's not the first time I hear such statements. One other instance is Erlang users writing that it's not the functional aspect that is making it effective (Erlang isn't particularly strong in that area anyway), it's garbage collection (i.e. no invalid pointers to dereference).
But then after several years of pushing forward with OCaml, in writing math analysis compilers and image recognition systems, I began to find that, despite proper typing and clean compiles, system level issues would arise and cause my programs to fail. The holy grail of provably correct code came tumbling down in the face of practical reality.
What happened with these OCaml programs? I do see quite a few deficits in OCamls practices, but I don't know how relevant they are or if they are even related to your experience, so that would be interesting to me.