[Teaching] Asking teachers: what support would you want to distribute OCaml to students ?

[Stephan Zdancewic]

At Penn we use OCaml and OcaIDE in Eclipse, but we avoid using any fancy 
libraries -- OCaml's graphics works for us on Windows, OSX and Linux.  
We use Eclipse mainly because we also teach Java in the same class, and 
getting students to use two different editors/IDEs would be a real pain. 
We've considered using virtual machines but haven't yet gone that route, 
so Windows support is pretty important for us.

Eclipse itself is becoming more of a hassle, so we'd be willing to ditch 
it in favor of a simpler solution, but haven't yet found something we like.

Our class targets Freshman, and many non-CS students take it, so we 
can't rely on them even knowing what the terminal is.

--Steve

On 11/26/14, 11:56 AM, Greg Morrisett wrote:
> Ditto at Harvard.
>
> -Greg
>
>> On Nov 26, 2014, at 10:44 AM, David Walker <princedpw at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> At Princeton, we also have lots of students with windows machines and support them by having them download a VM.
>>
>> Dave
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 10:17 AM, Benjamin Greenman <blg59 at cornell.edu> wrote:
>> 1/ What systems does it need to work in ? Does that include Windows ?
>>
>> For the functional programming course at Cornell, we dropped Windows support in favor of a vagrant vm [1] in Fall 2013 and have since been much happier. Students can just double-click a few things and have a working install (complete with extra packages like pa_ounit and qcheck), and staff no longer needs to worry about cross-platform issues (especially important for GUIs).
>>
>> [1] https://github.com/cs3110/vagrant-opam
>>
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