[Caml-list] teaching OCaml

[<robert.muller2@gmail.com>]

Greetings. Bob Muller here, in the CS dept. at Boston College. I've set out to
develop an intro CS course in ML that I hope will be well-suited for similar
universities in the US. My original plan was to teach the course in SML but
after talking with a few people at neighboring schools, I switched to OCaml. I
am now in the final weeks of the first run of the course.  I plan to document
my experience more fully at some point but I wanted to touch base with the
OCaml community because I'm teaching the course again in the spring and I am
leaning toward switching to F#.

While OCaml has in many respects been great and it's easy to see that my
students find the OCaml style of coding very compelling, there are significant
problems. Of course, OCaml wasn't designed for teaching but I'm hoping that
someone on this list might be able to advise me about solutions to some of
these that I just don't know about.

1. Error messages: It's difficult to give good type errors for ML but I was
hoping that the state-of-the-art of type error reporting had improved. When my
students receive a type error, they are utterly mystified,

2. GUIs: several of my problem sets work with simple graphics (e.g., rendering
tessellations) or animations (e.g., a maze walk or a simplified form of
tetris, or the game "Flow"). We have been hobbling along with the Graphics and
Labltk modules for this but it has been more pain than my students ought to
know. We also have some problem sets that work with audio so I would like
support for that.

Any thoughts, ideas and/or leads on either of these would be much appreciated.
I already plan to look at js_of_ocaml more closely.
Thank you,
Bob Muller