On Friday 13 March 2009 19:52:14 Yaron Minsky wrote:
> For those who are interested, I just posted a video of a talk I gave at CMU
> several weeks ago about Jane Street's use of OCaml. This is an updated
> version of the talk I gave at POPL last year. Various people have
> expressed an interest in showing the talk to their undergraduate classes,
> so I thought it worth mentioning on the list.

Very interesting. I do have a couple of points:

. If you want to see shared-memory parallelism done right look at Cilk. It is
both painless and incredibly efficient.

I know about Cilk, but I'll go back and look at it again. Thanks for the suggestion.

. I don't know how F# handles nulls but it has never caused me a problem and
I've used many .NET libraries from F# including MDX, WPF, XNA and, of course,
the framework itself.

Interesting. I haven't done a ton of F# hacking, so I don't know the details, but several people who work at Jane Street have stubbed their toe on this. It's quite possible that it mostly just doesn't come up, if you code in the appropriate style.

And as I tried to say in the talk, F# definitely has a lot to recommend it. It's just not a good match for us.

y