1. It’s whitespace insensitive, which means I can code something up really messy and the code formatted will automatically fix it up for me.

2. In general there aren’t a ton of punctuation characters that are very common, which is great for typing ergonomics. Don’t get me wrong, there are still a lot of symbols, but I feel compared to some languages such as Rust, they’re used a lot less.

Beyond the syntax, there are a couple of things I really like about the language itself:

1. Due to the way the language is scoped, whenever you encounter a variable you don’t recognize, you simply have to search in the up direction to find its definition, unless it’s explicitly marked as “rec”. This is helpful if you’re browsing code without any IDE tooling, there’s less guessing involved in finding where things are defined. Downside: if the “open” keyword is used to put all of a module’s values in scope, you’re usually gonna have a bad time.

2. The core language is very simple; in general there are three kinds of things that matter: values, types, and modules. All values have a type, and all values and types are defined in modules.

3. It’s very easy to nest let bindings in order to help localize the scope of intermediate values.

4. It has a very fast compiler with separate compilation. The dev cycle is usually very tight (oftentimes practically instantaneous).

5. Most of the language encourages good practice through sane defaults, but accessing escape hatches to do “dirty” things is very easy to do.

6. The compiler has some restrictions which may seem arcane, such as the value restriction and weak type variables, but they are valuable in preventing you from shooting yourself in the foot, and they enable some other useful features of the language such as local mutation.

Anyways, as we began the 3rd piece, I looked at the 2nd bassoonist and told her she would have to play all the solos (which she hadn’t prepared for).

At intermission, I had a crazy idea, so I found my sister in the audience and asked her if she had a stick of gum. To my delight she did, so I chewed it up, stuck it to the back of the pad, and put the pad back on the instrument. To my surprise the hack worked, and I was able to complete the rest of the concert.

tl;dr: My snot nosed 20 year old self violated a school-owned $20,000 instrument with 10 cents worth of chewing gum at intermission, but managed to play all my solos, and then afterwards learned how to properly reseat pads with a lighter.

- Dvorak: aoeu, htns, gcrl, mwvz

- Colemak: arst, neio, qwfp

- Mtgap: inea, htsr, dlcw, fvgj

etc...

Also, by extension, predators shouldn’t have to face starvation, and prey should have their population controlled in a humane way.

These are problems that can’t be solved today, or likely any time soon. But I don’t buy the argument that “just because it happens in nature, it’s right”. I think Mother Nature provides effective solutions to these problems, but I also believe they aren’t the optimal solutions. We can and should do better.

I find I can learn a lot of life lessons by reading a condensed account of a person’s entire life in their (auto)biography.

For the same reason, I would hope to learn a lot of great real life patterns from a book called Real World OCaml… a kind of condensed (auto)biography of an institution’s experience with a technology.