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

[Yaron Minsky]

On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 4:43 PM, Stephan Zdancewic <stevez at cis.upenn.edu> wrote:
> 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.

What kind of extra windows support do you need?  Sounds like you're
sticking to fairly simple libraries, which seems like it should help a
lot.  I guess getting good Merlin support would be good.  Actually, a
high quality merlin implementation that works on Windows and
integrates with Sublime Text well could be ideal.

For what it's worth, Core_kernel is I think fully portable to Windows,
and we're thinking of having the next edition of Real World OCaml
focus more on Core_kernel than Core, which should make the text more
applicable to more cases (including the Javascript use-case.)

> 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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