From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id XAA10610 for caml-red; Mon, 6 Nov 2000 23:09:04 +0100 (MET) Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id HAA26628 for ; Mon, 6 Nov 2000 07:26:35 +0100 (MET) Received: from sanson.reyes.somos.net (freyes.static.inch.com [216.223.199.224]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id eA66QW124112 for ; Mon, 6 Nov 2000 07:26:33 +0100 (MET) Received: from tomasa (tomasa.reyes.somos.net [10.0.0.11]) by sanson.reyes.somos.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id BAA39908; Mon, 6 Nov 2000 01:19:40 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from fran@reyes.somos.net) Message-Id: <200011060619.BAA39908@sanson.reyes.somos.net> From: "Francisco Reyes" To: "caml-list@inria.fr" , "Mattias Waldau" Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2000 01:17:03 -0500 Reply-To: "Francisco Reyes" Priority: Normal X-Mailer: PMMail 2000 Professional (2.10.2010) For Windows 98 (4.10.2222) In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: Good programming languages (Was: Redefinition doesn't work) Sender: weis@pauillac.inria.fr On Fri, 3 Nov 2000 09:44:11 +0100, Mattias Waldau wrote: >1. typed (to find typo-like bugs, or when changing the program) >2. interactive environment (to be able to test hard part of the program >without have to write elaborate function just for testing) >3. easy to use and understand libraries. >4. good syntax, which makes it easy to write the correct code >5. fast >6. portable, works on windows and linux >7. good support or good open source team >8. cheap > >3 for interactive environment (better than C, Java, SML, but much worse than >Lisp, Prolog, Scheme, examples of problem: #relet, not very good >emacs-modes, no object-browser), 2 for interactive. In my case at least Ocaml still shows too much of it's research background. It is taking me some time to get used to or even understand the output of the interactive environment. >2 for easy to use libraries (it is so hard to find the right function, I >have to search thru the PDF-file all the time), So far from the little I have seen it is not the libraries that it is a problem. It is the docs and the examples. I asked once if it was possible to contribute to the documentation and got no answer. For instance there is no samples with the libraries so for beginners it is difficult at the beginning to understand how to use a library because there are no examples. To make things worse I bought a book to try and learn Caml and the examples/exercises are highly math driven. I find this too be a horrible thing to have done. When I look at the exercises I spend more time trying to thing how the math is going to work out than how I am going to program the thing. Example: the first exercise is to prove that Ax^2 + bx + c = 0 is solvable given three parameters a,b,c. For someone who is contantly doing math this is probably trivial, but I have not taken any math clases on years and I don't see the point on linking the exercises so much to math. This perhaps is linked to the previous(current?) set of intended users. If Ocaml is to ever become a general purpose language then the docs/examples need to be less theorical and more practical. >2 for good syntax (it is very easy to spend a lot of time trying to get the >program to compile, for example I called a attribute in a record 'value', >and that works sometimes I have noticed :-), I agree with the 2. I don't know if it is my lack of having worked with other functional languages, but I find the Ocaml syntax strange. francisco Moderator of the Corporate BSD list http://www.egroups.com/group/BSD_Corporate