I recently wrote that Emacs startup time doesn’t matter and I got quite a lot of heat for it. I totally stand by everything I said there, but I acknowledge that different people have different use-cases and perspectives when it comes to this.

Every now and then I see people discussion one of the following:

OCaml is famous for allow you to do a lot of things like modules. Like really a lot! Advanced features like functors, aside, it’s really common to either alias module names to something shorter or localize open Module_name to a smaller scope:

In my previous article I mentioned that OCaml’s Stdlib leaves a lot to be desire when it comes to regular expressions. One thing I didn’t discuss back then was that the problem is somewhat mitigated by the excellent module Scanf, which makes it easy to parse structured data.

One of the things that bothered me initially in OCaml was the poor support for working in regular expressions in the standard library. Technically speaking, there’s no support for them at all!

If someone had told me a few months ago I’d be playing with .NET again after a 15+ years hiatus I probably would have laughed at this.1 Early on in my career I played with .NET and Java, and even though .NET had done some things better than Java (as it had the opportunity to learn from some early Java mistakes), I quickly settled on Java as it was a truly portable environment. I had some C# courses in the university and I wrote my bachelor’s thesis in C#. It was a rewrite of Arch Linux’s pacman, running on Mono. This was way back in 2007. ↩

Often when I’m setting up new computers I take a bit of time to evaluate my programming toolbox and make some (usually small) adjustments to it. In January I got myself a new mac mini M4 and for whatever reasons I got inspired to dive much deeper than usual. This time around I spent a lot of time playing with different terminals, editors (e.g. neovim and helix), shells, configuration managers (mostly chezmoi), etc.

Every programming language comes with some “batteries” included - mostly in the form of its standard library. That’s typically all of the functionality that’s available out-of-the-box, without the need to install additional libraries. (although the definition varies from language to language) Usually standard libraries are pretty similar, but I think that OCaml’s a bit “weird” and slightly surprising in some regards, so I decided to write down a few thoughts on it and how to make the best of it.

I wasn’t an early adopter of TreeSitter in Emacs, as usually such big transitions are not smooth and the initial support for TreeSitter in Emacs left much to be desired. Recently, however, Emacs 30 was released with many improvements on that front, and I felt the time was right for me to (try to) embrace TreeSitter.

A couple of days ago I noticed on OCaml’s Discord server that someone was confused by OCaml function applications (invocations) like these:

.zshrc simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. – Leonardo Da Zshinci