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yminsky.bsky.social
Occasional OCaml programmer. Host of Signals and Threads http://signalsandthreads.com
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A new Signals and Threads just dropped, with @ianthehenry.bsky.social! This one is about building tools for traders, but it also has some fun dives into Ian's personal projects, including bauble.studio and janet.guide. Anyway, more here: signalsandthreads.com/building-too...

I'm curious if anyone could summarize for me the state of evidence on the utility of type systems in reducing software faults. I'm aware of and even the source of some of the anecdotal evidence, but I'm curious if there's anything even vaguely methodologically rigorous.

Wild stuff.

The other great thing about AI-assisted programming in OCaml is expect tests. They give you a great way of making the behavior of your program visible, both to you, and to the AI. It provides a valuable feedback loop that the AI can leverage in all sorts of flexible ways.

I've been talking with @avsm.bsky.social about this, and he makes a cool point about OCaml and AI-assisted programming. Which is that OCaml's beautiful interface language gives you a nice way to interact with an agent: first make mli's, then write implementations.

A periodic reminder: Jane Street is hiring front-end devs! janestreet.com/join-jane-st... It's a different flavor of front-end work than you might see elsewhere, but it's great if you love UIs, FP, and type systems that are ergonomic and reliably help you get things right.

An epic hack, getting OCaml running on a TI-84+ CE calculator. farlow.dev/2025/05/17/o...

I spoke with my old friend Jim Sciutto about the discovery that a copy of the Magna Carta at the Harvard Law School Library purchased for $26.50 in 1956 turns out to be a real one from AD 1300. (!)

#OCaml #OCamlPlanet

Such a pleasure hosting this at Jane Street!

Just how good are locally hostable code models on Cambridge first year OCaml assignments? @anil.recoil.org , @jon.recoil.org and I wanted to find out, so ran some tests. TL;DR Qwen3 means we might need new assignments. toao.com/blog/ocaml-l...

And please repost/share with folk you think might be interested!

If you're interested in editors and developer tools, consider applying to Jane Street! It might be an especially good fit if you're an excited vim or vscode user who would love working on making those experiences better for a den of functional programmers.

Tests by @sadiq.toao.com and @jon.recoil.org with Qwen3 show it's a monster local LLM model that outperforms on our @cst.cam.ac.uk OCaml Tripos exercises. I wouldn't say I'm panicking, but there are small beads of sweat forming on my brow as I ponder future exam strategies toao.com/blog/ocaml-l...

On May 22, we're hosting Build Meetup 2025 at Jane Street's London office. There will be talks about Bazel, Buck2, a buzzing hallway track on Dune, and more. Sign-ups are still open, so if you're excited about build systems, you should sign up! share.hsforms.com/2-kAtpya7Sou...

The next release of OCaml's package manager, opam, will have support for dependency management with Nix! ryan.freumh.org/opam-nix.html #nix #ocaml

I've been looking for presentation software that I actually would enjoy using and would be reasonably productive, and presenterm seems like the best thing I've found. Terminal-based, simple markdown-based format, supports images via kitty. Kinda great. github.com/mfontanini/p...

A fun post about using HardCaml for solving Advent of Code on an FPGA. blog.janestreet.com/advent-of-ha...

Yay for the first unikernel paper getting the ASPLOS most influential paper award, and some reflections on it anil.recoil.org/notes/uniker...

I've played around with a bunch of the coding assistants out there, including Cursor, Aider, and Claude Code. What I haven't really seen is anything good for handling large code bases, and doing sensible context construction within them. What am I missing?

Vintage? Who are you calling old?

One thing I really like about this talk is that it talks both about what kind of language OCaml is now, and also what are the design goals for the kind of language we want to turn it into. youtu.be/g3qd4zpm1LA?...

A great new talk from Chris Casinghino, about making OCaml a better language for performance engineering. youtu.be/g3qd4zpm1LA?...