I still think it worth my time kneading dough by hand. It teaches me the various properties of flour, how external factors like humidity or temperature impact the overall process, and I believe that it makes me a better baker, even when I use a machine, because I am better at controlling what the machine does. When I get a new brand of flour I will make sure to bake everything by hand first to "get a feel".
Kneading by hand is also very relaxing to me. This is probably the main reason I bake in the first place.
Programming, and other activities are not very different. We now have machines that can do it faster, at a fraction of the quality many people deem good enough. If you hate coding, that is probably all you need to use, and learning a new language might just be a frustrating experience not worth subjecting yourself to. But if you enjoy coding then it should make you better at it, even when you use the machines.
the average person spends 6(!) hours a day on their smartphone, the average TikTok user spends 100 minutes on the app alone. This isn't about artificial scarcity, it's about the average person looking like the Wall-E people
People who are asking these questions are saying "will me spending my time learning OCaml help me land that job that pays six figures and has health insurance so I can not rot away living on the margin". They aren't saying "I only do things that will make me money".
again, it's not a small window. It's six hours. That's almost half your waking day. People spend virtually their entire leisure time rotting away on low quality entertainment.
>will me spending my time learning OCaml help me land that job
that's a pointless question for one you never know if something will land you a job, new opportunities don't open up before you do something, secondly the relevant question is, should I stop doing X and start learning Ocaml, or Chinese, or take a welding class because all of that even if it doesn't work out beats scrolling through Instagram.
I don't even take offense with the idea that you engage in activity that makes you money, because pure selfishness on that front would be an improvement to what most people are doing now.
As for OCAML vs not, I think the vast majority of even intellectual and studious people would be better served trying to AI max and build some kind of agent serving businesses than trying to get a job at, uhh, Jane Street. 1% of the best engineers in the world get to work in that language, so yeah the parent makes a valid point
[1] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs3110/2025sp/
[2] https://pragprog.com/titles/tpp20/the-pragmatic-programmer-2...
https://tenor.com/view/tf2-wall-e-team-fortress-2-autobalanc...
The answer is still the same as well, people learn ocaml either because they enjoy it, or because learning a functional language makes them a better programmer overall and teaches your brain to approach a problem in a different way.
An oblique explanation: https://croissanthology.com/earring
More recently, you had to go to the store and buy it, which meant you didn't have much variety.
Today, learning an instrument is for social status, inheriting the shine of the past, where music was rare and costly. The reason to learn an instrument today is because the former situation was romanticized.
It'll probably take a generation before people ease into guilt-free enjoying infinite, fully generated music.
I would rate them as about 5% true and 95% false, as explanation of the past and prediction of the future.
The satisfaction of learning to do something difficult isn't going away, and the social status associated with it won't either.
Lol. The reason to learn an instrument is because it is directly pleasurable to play an instrument. You've got consumer/spectator brain.
I mean, why post a comment when you could have just read a comment?
I wanted to learn a functional programming language with powerful type capabilities and I chose the Lean Language for that and not OCamel or Haskell. Reason being: Better type system (dependent types!), applicable in formal domains and can use it to learn math too.
For your bread and butter programming, there is already JS/Go anyways.
So don't see much point in learning OCamel.
But what about the future generations skipping the step of learning the OCaml's, the C's, the Python's...? It's quite concerning.
Oh by the way, yes. Learn OCaml!
Humans are the ones who Understand, while LLMs only Know.
So inter-disciplinary/cross-disciplinary insights, new modes of thinking/reasoning, flashes of insight etc. are still in the purview of Humans only. AI/LLMs can help focus and short-circuit the study of various subjects but their understanding can only happen within a human "Mind". If you do not even have basic domain knowledge (i.e. unknown unknowns) how can you even prompt/query an LLM for answers?
A few illustrative examples; a) Newton came up with limits/calculus out of a need to measure continuous motion with varying speeds b) Kekule came up with the benzene ring from a dream where he saw a snake grab its own tail c) Descartes came up with the cartesian coordinates in an attempt to solve geometry via algebra etc. Each of these was a novel leap of insight bringing together various concepts to create entirely new knowledge domains.
So one should learn/study the core concepts/ideas in various domains and then push the tedious mechanical labour onto the machines. In this regard see also the concept of "Active Learning" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_learning
That being said, you may as well use Rust. The extra complexity of manual memory management and Rust idiosyncracies are easily dealt with by the LLM.
Also, it may very well be the decade of formal verification - if so, OCaml is a good place to be.
This is assuming that the current state of LLMs is sustainable, which it definitely isn’t.
Hhhmmmmm
Personally I try to stick within my own niche though - ruby, java and also python (ruby is unfortunately losing grounds really hard now, the writing was on the well in the last some years though, and people such as DHH are now indeed a liability rather than an asset to be had, but that's a side topic).
I think what LLMs will force in the long run is to make programming languages used by real humans in a traditional way, more effective. That is, writing code by humans will have to become a lot more efficient, both time-wise and speed-wise. And for that there is always a use case IMO since LLMs are, despite the promo, incredibly stupid.