OCAML Official Tutorial Suck

By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .

After 2 decades, OCaml's official tutorial still blatantly suck.

ocaml bad tutorial 2016-03-01
“As far as I can tell”

here's a quote from the official tutorial:

As far as I can tell OCaml doesn't have single-precision floating point numbers at all.

from official ocaml tutorial https://ocaml.org/learn/tutorials/basics.html

We have, a advanced language, encompassing advanced type theory and compiler science, yet, in 20 years, the official tutorial displays guessing words and weasel writing?

'tis not just ocaml. This is a epidemic that's in unix, perl, python, haskell, and even clojure. 〔see Idiocy of Computer Language Docs: Unix, Python, Perl, Haskell

There's something deeply wrong here. Something deeply wrong about the computing industry, or somewhere.

programers, either totally don't give a fuck about documentation (they rely on “grok”), or, are totally antithetic to writing documentation. (too clumsy with the pen?)

oh, wait, but LOOK! yonder there hacker types, have and embrace and trumpet Literate Programming.

you heard of literate programing, right? That is, when people want writing code to become like writing prose. We see the fandom of such in emacs, in perl, in whatever current fashion of language, everywhere, non-stop for 2 decades.

one hand wants to write doc at all times, while the other hand can't be bothered with basic doc writing.

ocaml bad tutorial note about semicolon 2016-07-31
OCaml official tutorial, 2 full pages guesswork on ocaml semicolon, then include a correction.

it's finally fixed, on 2018-08-16 by Yann Régis Gianas (aka yurug).

ocaml tutorial fix 2018-09-12 1fffd
https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml.org/commit/68b05866c52063027d2ad725d866424615ac8218