Over last semester, I was introduced to OCaml via a class on Functional Programming. The class was fantastic; if you’re at McGill and have any say in your curriculum (aka you’re not in Engineering), I highly recommend taking it ASAP. And try taking it with Brigitte Pientka.

One of the things I picked up from the course was a renewed appreciation for Emacs. The bulk of the development work was done on Emacs, with a special mode for OCaml called Tuareg. However, installing Tuareg was a pain; the process took me a couple of hours of reading multiple guides, some of which were out of date. I finally decided to not follow what everyone seemed to be telling me and decided to use an Emacs package manager called Marmalade which made my life much easier. Note that this will only work if you’re running Emacs24. So if you’re looking to run Tuareg Mode, save some hours of your life and just do the following:

# To add Marmalade repository to Emacs, open Emacs and type: 
M-x package-refresh-contents [RET]
M-: (add-to-list 'package-archives '("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/"))
M-x package-refresh-contents [RET]   
 
# To install Tuareg  
M-x package-install [RET] tuareg [RET]

Voila! It’s that easy. Life is functional (badum-tssh) again.