My experience with OCaml has transformed how I think about programming and complex system design. This may also be true if you learn any other functional programming language, but OCaml is easy and flexible which makes it good imo as a door towards the more formal part of comp sci. Even for steering an LLM I think this might help.
My experience with lisp was exactly that: it completely changed how I think about programming, but much more, how I think about systems and engineering. (I learned it through SICP)
You can also learn for your own amusement, and solely for the fun of comprehension; a lot of mathematician were driven by this. It's a shame current social value places so much utilitariaism on learning.
As always, it is good to be aware that many people are too anxious about more existential issues to comfortably an consistently expend effort on intellectually-taxing tasks that aren't perceived as directly related to their survival. If it's an issue with social values, it's less of one related to learning as it is to perpetuating artificial scarcity.
You could have asked this question 10 years ago, long before llms. It's not like you'd realistically would get an ocaml job back then when there's so few of them, so why bother?
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.
Cultural inertia: until recently, you couldn't just press play and get even a wide selection of music: for most of history, if you wanted music, you had to make it or hire someone to do it for you.
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.
Seeing that you already know programming, I'd say it'd be less risky for you. But the only reason you're able to pilot an LLM to do programming for you, is because you understand programming and architecture.
But what about the future generations skipping the step of learning the OCaml's, the C's, the Python's...? It's quite concerning.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Cswiqrq6So
Lately, I keep asking myself, do I need to learn this new thing, should I force myself to learn this thing, LLMs know it anyways and so on.
So (asking genuinely), should we learn these things?
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.
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!
* Other “pure” hindley-milner languages are tied but among them ocaml has some particular strengths that I’m sure others will discuss.
(I have my own answers, but I'd love to hear yours, too.)
(2) performance