Re: [Caml-list] Ocaml, a practical functional language?

["Luca de Alfaro" <luca@dealfaro.org>]

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I also cast my vote for Ocaml.
Ocaml is the best compromise between pleasure of coding, speed of code, the
compiler working for you (strong type checking = most bugs found at compile
time).  Memory management is much better than in Python.
I particularly favor Ocaml for largish projects.  There, the type system
helps you gain confidence that the part of the system that you did not touch
in a change (typically, 99%) is unaffected by the change.  This makes
debugging and development much easier and painless.  I certainly would not
imagine any more developing in languages where any change may break far-away
things without warning.

And where else can you find a debugger that can execute code (or give you
the impression it does) backwards?
This is invaluable when trying to find things like where an exception is
thrown: you simply run the code until it exits throwing the exception, then
you back off a few steps until you find what is throwing the exception and
why.  C programmers grappling with Segmentation Faults are very surprised to
see this style of debugging!
And even though Ocaml was born as a functional language, I am happy using it
even for code that has to access databases and interact with the web; see
http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/WikiTrust .

The one drawback of Ocaml is that it is harder to find developers for it.
But this can be an advantage as well: since the barrier to entry is slightly
higher, a typical Ocaml programmer tends to be a better programmer than a
typical perl or C++ programmer, in my limited experience.

Luca

On Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 9:36 AM, Peng Zang <peng.zang@gmail.com> wrote:

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> On Saturday 30 August 2008 03:50:30 pm circ ular wrote:
> > I have tried a lot of languages but never really felt 100% satisfied.
> > I really like Python, it makes me very productive but Iwant something
> > a little more functionally oriented plus a static(optionally declared)
> > typesystem.
> >
> > I tried Haskell and I really like it but I find it hard to get used to
> > some things(like no destructive updates of datastructures outside the
> > IO Monad).
> > Ocaml seems a little bit more practical and it is aslo very fast(well
> > haskell is too).
> >
> > tried lisp at first but libraries and documentation just werent up to
> > standards there either.
> >
> > so far Pytho is the best Ive found (for me) but still isn't satisfied.
> >
> > could ocaml be what I look for?
>
> I think OCaml is what you are looking for.  I went through a similar search
> for a comfortable language.  My order was a bit different, lisp first, then
> python, then OCaml, then played a bit with Haskell but am sticking with
> OCaml.
>
> I find OCaml to be a great compromise.  Haskell is cool, but it forces you
> to
> do things in certain ways and use a lot of abstraction which often seems
> overkill, making simple things much harder than they should be.  I really
> like how easy things are in Python but large programs I find are impossible
> to maintain because it's not statically typed (it's also slow.. but that
> might have been ok).  Lisp is really great with what you can do and many
> simple things are simple, but it doesn't have the scaffolding to let you
> scale up to big stuff (missing libs and stuff).  OCaml has been great.  It
> has its drawbacks and yucky corner cases like all languages.  Overall
> though,
> it's been good and I've been able to find reasonable workarounds for things
> I
> don't like.  I encourage you to give it a serious try.
>
> There's a great book on OCaml here:
>
>  http://www.cs.caltech.edu/courses/cs134/cs134b/book.pdf
>
> The best emacs mode for ocaml is tuareg mode here:
>
>  http://www-rocq.inria.fr/~acohen/tuareg/<http://www-rocq.inria.fr/%7Eacohen/tuareg/>
>
> I also write some additional on top of tuareg mode to be more like the
> SLIME
> mode for lisp but it's alpha (mostly because I wrote it for myself and
> packaging it and making robust is a lot of work that I'm too busy to
> handle)
> so I don't really recommend it yet.
>
> Peng
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