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

[Andrei de Araújo Formiga]

Has anyone looked at using IOCaml, including for graphics? Lessons
could be distributed as notebooks and students could run the examples
and tests in-place. There's even a version that can run over a full
JavaScript kernel, which shouldn't need any installation on the part
of users. Of course, this is limited by what libraries will run when
compiled to JS (any lib that binds to C code is out of that set). I
feel that a bit more of infrastructure around IOCaml for teaching
could be immensely useful.

2014-11-26 21:59 GMT-03:00 David Walker <princedpw at gmail.com>:
> Thanks. I forwarded this on to my students.  We'll see if some of them try
> it.
>
> Dave
>
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 2:39 PM, Yaron Minsky <yminsky at janestreet.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> There appears to be Merlin support for sublime text out there:
>>
>> https://github.com/Cynddl/sublime-text-merlin
>>
>> I think that coming up with good default setups for Merlin and the
>> remaining build tools would be nice too.  For example, you want the
>> compiler warnings in Merlin to mesh nicely with the ones you pick in
>> your build.
>>
>> y
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 2:06 PM, David Walker <princedpw at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I agree that having good editor set-ups would be great.  I would love
>> > one
>> > that is compatible with Pa_ounit.
>> >
>> > By the way, I have also found that many of my students seem to prefer
>> > using
>> > sublime over emacs.
>> >
>> > Dave
>> >
>> > On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 1:15 PM, Yaron Minsky <yminsky at janestreet.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> My sense from having talked to a bunch of people who are teaching
>> >> these classes in the US is that Windows is probably important longer
>> >> term, but short term there are other higher value things to improve
>> >> upon.  I think having good ways of doing graphical examples is surely
>> >> one, and I tend to think that Javascript is a far better target than
>> >> X11.
>> >>
>> >> I'd also love to have good default editor setups that we could
>> >> deliver, perhaps through OPAM itself.  Having a nicely set up editor
>> >> configs with things like Merlin and ocp-indent working out of the box
>> >> would be great.
>> >>
>> >> y
>> >>
>> >> On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 11:56 AM, Greg Morrisett
>> >> <greg at eecs.harvard.edu>
>> >> 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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>> >> >> Teaching at lists.ocaml.org
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>> >> >>
>> >> >>
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>
>
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