Caramel - have you used it?

If so, where/how and what do you like about it? :003:

Caramel is a functional language for building type-safe, scalable, and maintainable applications

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Huh, not ran across this before, this is cool, built in ocaml and backed by erlang, very nice looking. Has both rebar and mix support as well. Syntax is very ML-like (lot of those popping up on the beam lately, lol) so it looks quite nice and is easy to read. I’m curious to see how it will develop in the future as well although it looks like not much development for the past 6+ months?

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I absolutely loved the work Ostera was doing on this. But according to the Discord group development of Caramel is indeed stopped. The concept of using the oCaml compiler frontend to write Erlang sounds like the best of all worlds to me. I really hope this project gets back moving someday.

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I think it’s also worth pointing out the opam package that drives a lot of carmel caramel/erlang at main · AbstractMachinesLab/caramel · GitHub

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Oh that’s a shame, Leandro was excited about the project too! We’ll leave the section up until it is official deprecated (making keeping it up might re-ignite some interest even…)

You’re in good company with @OvermindDL1, then, he’s a huge OCaml fan :lol:

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Check out Gleam if you’re looking for a friendly, simple typed language for the BEAM! And Sesterl is still more of a work in progress but I think it’s the closest alternative to Caramel feature-wise, already has some OCaml features (e.g first-class modules) and more are on the roadmap (GADTs)

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Sesterl was new to me as of yesterday. It looks really nice. Gleam also is great, I’ve played with it and loved the experience.

But there is something additionally appealing with the approach Carmel took. It’s sytanx was OCaml, I didn’t need to reconfigure my editor, learn a new type system, or understand new semantics. I’m not sure that promise would persist as the language grew but, the approach just feels correct to me. Having said that perhaps I should spend the time with purescript and purerl.

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Good point! I don’t know OCaml too well so I was learning Caramel and OCaml at the same time by going through the “Real World OCaml” book, here are my executable notes for the first 3 chapters. Syntax highlighting in my editor, and code formatter just worked! Possibly other OCaml tooling could work with little tweaks as well.

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It appears that there may be a future with more Carmel development.

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purerl is another player in this field which is worth a look

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If a language takes off, earning a living through it (i.e from doing something you love!) isn’t usually a problem. You can earn through things like public speaking (conferences) books, consulting, or be employed to work on the language by a large company (such as when Heroku hired the creator of Ruby, Matz, to work on Ruby).

The trick is getting it to such a stage :lol:

I think the summary from this blog post could be a good idea for @leostera to consider:

Another approach is to find a corporate sponsor: searching for OCaml companies who want a different backend, or Erlang companies struggling with type safety. I expect Caramel would struggle to get an entire salary out of one company, but it might be less difficult to get a few CTOs who see potential to put $250 a month each into the aforementioned crowd-funding platform.

Or perhaps even a sole long-term sponsor where their branding is always present in a meaningful way, perhaps with a deal for say the first 5 or 10 years or so depending on either regular payments or an upfront sum.

The other thing the blog post covers is identifying who would want to use or need Caramel most… as that could be the best place to start looking for someone who may be able to help fund it.

Either way I wish @leostera all the best - I am huge believer in following your passion! :003:

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Give it a check to Sesterl, it looks good → GitHub - gfngfn/Sesterl: An ML-inspired statically-typed Erlang it has rebar3 support and already deps for Cowboy and others

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