Hi,
OCaml Packages · Browse Community Packages boasts of having 4,000+ packages but only shows a few most used packages at the front page (such as lwt, odoc, fmt, etc.)
The “search” option that is provided works to find something that we want, if we search for it.
However I have found this experience to be bad for new users (like me).
As a new user I want to do mainly few things:
- Find the most commonly used packages instead of asking others for recommendation.
- Find new experimental packages that are interesting and might be useful
- Find a list of all packages even if I don’t need them.
The third can be done using opam list --all on my workstation, which is somewhat useful for the other two. However most likely others who won’t think of using this command, won’t be able to find the packages they need.
It would be better if we were able to find the packages directly on ocaml.org.
In simple words, we need better ways to find Ocaml packages.
Specifically we need filters such as,
- sort by most downloaded packages,
- sort by most liked/disliked packages,
- sort by most recently updated/uploaded packages,
- and more …
This would help new users to discover good packages easily.
Thanks.
Answering some questions that others might have in opposition to this idea.
“Why not use the tags and search for things that you need?”
I don’t know what I need. I didn’t know that I’d need visitors or ppx.show packages because I didn’t know those operations were even possible in OCaml. I didn’t know that there were simpler ways to walk through the complicated AST I was creating using visitors. So for a long time I kept writing the code to walk through AST nodes manually. Again, again, and again.
Almost gave up OCaml because of this thinking that all code I write had to be so tedious.
“Why not ask others for recommendation?”
Asking the same recommendation question of “Which library should I use?” becomes annoying for most forum members, and even if they’re helpful, their answers get saved in the history of the internet, and five years later someone else googling for the same question might keep finding the old answers, which might be outdated by then.
It’s better if the website lets us sort by “most used”, “most liked/disliked” etc. filters, so that we can easily find what are the currently most usable packages in the ecosystem.
It’d be even better if an editorial team selected their favorite packages and highlight them.
“Why not use opam list –all to find what you need?”
It shows all 4,000+ packages without any way to filter out what we need.