chenglou changed the topic of #reasonml to: facebook.github.io/reason/. Public channel logs at irclog.whitequark.org/reasonml. Discord: discord.gg/reasonml
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<mst>
chenglou: you didn't happen to get anywhere did you?
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<chenglou>
@mst nope... got busy documenting other stuff
<mst>
chenglou: fair, just wondering
<mst>
chenglou: just I (a) want to know (b) don't want to make you explain it another N times when I can just read the write-up once you're done :)
<chenglou>
if you'd like to know: with Reason, we'd like to onboard the folks from other languages (such as js) onto ocaml, and making the onboard familiar is part of it
<chenglou>
while fixing some of ocaml's syntax nits
<mst>
that's a pretty reasonable goal
<mst>
ocaml's syntax doesn't honestly trouble me but I can definitely see reason being easier to convince people to contribute to
<chenglou>
e.g. if-blocks, module/record/list syntax, etc.
<mst>
(then again, I don't mind Tcl, prolog, erlang or perl syntax so I'm probably an outlier)
<chenglou>
tbh I don't mind much, but still, it's not targeted toward me. Though I work in JS so I get the JS folks' mentality
<chenglou>
while we're at it, we're also using Reason as an umbrella project to make a curated workflow & toolchain & lib choices for the newcomers
<chenglou>
like, a stdlib, a build system, an npm workflow, while making sure we don't churn the ocaml community while doing this
<mst>
yeah
<mst>
I'm kinda fascinated by the potential to have something that has a command line binary that's pleasant to distribute/install, and still share a bunch of the logic code with a web app, *and* not scare the crap out of the JS folks
<chenglou>
@mst ultimately it's like what the author of BuckleScript (who's active in our discord room) said. BS (and Reason) are there so that people can find a job in ocaml
<chenglou>
we've got a few folks coming into Facebook who'd like to work on Reason-related projects and back then I had to say "sorry, we don't have headcount". It sucks
<mst>
huh
<mst>
I'd've thought "leaarning the ocaml semantics" was more of a learning curve than learning the syntax anyway
<mst>
at least in practice
<chenglou>
as in, ocaml's not popular enough for us to say "yes we've got a position in ocaml/reason here in a few teams"
<mst>
and that the syntax was mostly about *perceived* approachability
<chenglou>
yes
<mst>
but perceived approachability is, of course, still important
<chenglou>
and if that's good enough for 1% of JS community (generous estimate) to bother looking at it then it's good
<mst>
see also: elixir/erlang, wherein "getting your head around OTP and the process model" is probably more important in practice
<mst>
but getting people to the point of finding that out is tricky
<chenglou>
the other thing is, we'd like to onboard folks like JS devs to leverage their expertise to make the ocaml community better too. Low-hanging fruits like revamping the look of the docs