I suspect that among this crowd it should go without saying, but I think OCaml integration with emacs or vim would have solved most/all of the author's issues. In particular, I'm a big fan of the Omlet vim plugins. Particularly useful for someone (like myself) just getting started with OCaml. It's also nice that you never have to leave the comfort of the terminal.
Yes, but he seems to be more of an "IDE guy", and apparently, Eclipse did the trick, solving all his issues.
Actually, Vim or Emacs would have probably created more issues for him if he's not used to those tools.
The author says he spent two weeks setting up Eclipse to work with OCaml; he's a serious productivity maven. It would have taken less time to learn enough vi or Emacs to get by, their OCaml modes, and would have benefitted him in the long run in many other ways.
No, read carefully, he did spend 2 weeks setting up Visual Studio for F#, not for the Eclipse setup. One can reasonably think he did spend less time for the Eclipse setup.
Besides, I don't think you can be as productive with Vim or Emacs in 2 weeks as he is or would be with Eclipse, if he is really not into this kind of tool. This is just a personal statement, I can't backup this claim with any data obviously.
"So for now, I decided to abandon F# in favor of OCaml, spending yet another two weeks trying to set up a great work environment. [Eclipse screenshot] And there it was."
Reads to me like spent an extra two weeks on Eclipse.
As for your other point, I specifically said that he'd learn enough vi or Emacs "to get by," not achieve equivalent productivity. However, he'd be coding in OCaml within a day or so, not two weeks (a total of four weeks, including his F# experiment) later.
I understand the need to tweak the working environment to maximize productivity. I do so on a regular basis, and my .emacs.d/init.el and .zshrc files have evolved tremendously over the last ten years. There's a difference between spending an hour here and there, though, and two weeks. I would be inclined to fire a programmer who spent a total of four weeks mucking around trying different IDEs instead of turning out useful work.
You're right, I didn't see the other 2 weeks mention.
I also find 2 weeks for setting up an environment very long, but one can imagine he didn't spend 2 weeks before writing his first line of OCaml.
And even if he did so, I think he would have spent the equal amount of time for configuring Emacs and/or Vim.
I agree. I've recently moved to emacs, and it has taken me at least 3 or 4 weeks to feel really comfortable with it, and be reasonably productive. If you're a Windows person, moving to either emacs or vim (Cream can help with vim, I suppose) is a big step, as you lose many of your normal keyboard shortcuts (and yes, I know you can rebind things in those editors).
While it seems he found something which seems did the trick for him and it's hard to to dispute his comments about the maturity of OCaml vs F#, his complaints about the F# interactive console is not 100% correct.
You can easily write a F# script once, and have that launch in the F# Interactive Shell within Visual Studio whenever you like, with the latest builds running.
