Comment by phtrivier

Ooooh, the memories...

Caml was how I was taught computer science in prépa and first few years of engineering school, a mere 25 years ago.

(Ok, I had done bits of BASIC before, but I had time to recover.)

To be honest, the learning path was

1. Lots of maths. Then add some more.

2. Algos in pseudo code. (In "French", pseudo code, of course, because, why not ?)

3. Caml as "executable pseudo code". With all the warnings and a hints of disgust as the use of mutation and side effect. (And of course ":=" his completely different from "=", what are we, beasts ?)

4. Lots of exams where you have to write properly indented programs on paper on the first try to submit all sorts of recursive trees to all sorts of horrendous manipulations - and you can imagine the grader doing the mother of all code reviews

5. Re do that again in engineering school, because a third of the class had done zero computer science, and the other third had learn in Pascal

6. Then learn C and assembler, and get your mind blown in the exact opposite direction

7. See your teachers reluctantly say that "you should just learn java", because "that's what used in the industry", and "no one will ever get a job writing caml anyway"

...

25 years later : yup, some people managed to get jobs writing a dialect of caml for this small startup in a garage serving cat pictures and racist memes to billions of people

26 years later: "you should just learn to prompt LLMs anyway", because "that's what the industry needs, and no one will get a job programming any more"