Xah Talk Show 2026-07-27 Ep810. on why ocaml fsharp are best langs. cpp worst.
highlights
- why is fsharp, ocaml, the best programing language
- https://youtu.be/miy9rJ9V8cE?t=58
- Xah Talk Show 2026-07-27 Ep810. on why ocaml fsharp are best langs. cpp worst.
Video Summary (Generated by AI, Edited by Human.)
In this video, Xah Lee shares his perspectives on programming languages, focusing on his belief that ML and its descendants—specifically OCaml and F#—are superior languages compared to mainstream ones like C, C++, JavaScript, and PHP (1:07, 21:54, 47:08).
Key themes and discussions include:
The superiority of ML/OCaml/F#: Xah Lee argues that the Hindley-Milner type system (introduced in the 1970s) provides the best approach to type inference, which he contrasts with the "idiocy" of manually declaring types for the machine in languages like C and C++ (5:25, 14:00-15:35).
The legacy of Lisp: He emphasizes that many essential modern programming features—such as automatic memory management, functional programming, interpreted environments (REPLs), and exception handling—originated from Lisp (9:37-13:20).
Social forces in language adoption: Xah Lee posits that the popularity of languages like JavaScript, PHP, and C++ is driven by corporate and social forces rather than technical excellence (21:34, 29:37).
Personal background and learning: He discusses his 30-year history as a coder, starting with the Wolfram Language (which he considers a magnitude more advanced than other languages) and his long-time experience with Emacs Lisp (23:13, 34:55).
Practical coding explorations: Throughout the video, he attempts to explore how to call shell commands from F# (20:19, 54:00) and discusses the challenges of finding native ways to get image dimensions (width/height) on Windows compared to macOS (113:28-115:36).
- ML (programming language)
- https://rescript-lang.org/
- https://ocaml.org/
- https://rust-lang.org/
- https://julialang.org/
- Golang: get image width height 📜
- Python: get image width height 📜
- Powershell: get image width height 📜
- add csharp, fsharp
- Computer Languages Characters Frequency
# call shell command print qx("dir")