cross-posted from: https://lemy.lol/post/19181146

I just started to learn Ocaml to learn functional programming. I will use it to build a CLI that’s mostly orchestrating other programs.

My experience is mostly in JS / TS, but I’ve also coded a good bit in Python and Lua.

Below, I provided a list of things I learned or focused on while using OCaml. But I feel like I must be missing something. This is only moderately different from what I’m used to in JS. I expected something more radical. Moreover, I constantly hear a lot of FP jargon (like “highly kinded types”, monads, etc) that I feel am still missing.

So far, here’s what I studied:

• immutability
• avoid side affects
• static typing
• recursion instead of loops
• option / maybe
• higher order functions
• conditionals and other constructs as expressions, when they’re statements in other languages
• pipelines and functions as input —> output
• currying
• scoping with let

What am I missing?