[Caml-list] Saying hi and the most basic question

[Caml-list] Saying hi and the most basic question

[Joaquin Bernal]

Hi all. I've just subscribed to the list (most redundant sentence
ever) so I'm dropping the first question. Are there any tutorials or
books available for download (english or spanish) besides Michael
Mauny's "Functional Programing using Caml Light" and the OCaml 3.07
Reference Manual itself?

Besides that, what was your first project using Caml? I'd like to
start mine, so maybe you can give advice about the kind of project
most suitable for learning.

What I've seen about Caml has wet my apettite and I'm sure I'll be
starving soon :) It promises being the elegant and powerful language I
was looking for. I've been using C/C++, Delphi, Lua, Java, Ruby, PHP,
etc. last years and I was starting with Python lately, but I got in
touch with Caml and I think we're going to keep together for a while
:)

Cheers, and please excuse my english.

-- 
Joaquin Bernal
jobe@baara.com

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RE: [Caml-list] Saying hi and the most basic question

[ronniec95]

I got hooked on Caml just by re-writing a lot of the utilities we had at
work written in perl/shell in Caml. It won't teach you the higher-order
functional aspects of caml but it will give you and instant gratification
in terms of results.

I learnt a lot about the std libraries by doing this - and it felt quite
good to get something that was so much faster than the original in 1/2 as
many lines typically.

Then moved to writing slightly larger pieces, (well I'm at a investment
house) so wrote this com+ component with nicholas cannase's stuff on windows
for excel. (much nicer than VB!)

That's it so far. I guess I've not really learnt proper functional programming
but I'm moer productive at work and I know a bit of Caml.

Have fun though.

Ronnie

>-- Original Message --
>Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 18:36:32 +0100
>From: Joaquin Bernal <jobe@baara.com>
>Reply-To: Joaquin Bernal <jobe@baara.com>
>To: Caml List <caml-list@inria.fr>
>Subject: [Caml-list] Saying hi and the most basic question
>
>
>Hi all. I've just subscribed to the list (most redundant sentence
ever) so I'm dropping the first question. Are there any tutorials or
books available for download (english or spanish) besides Michael
Mauny's "Functional Programing using Caml Light"
>and the OCaml 3.07
Reference Manual itself?

Besides that, what was your first project using Caml? I'd like to
start mine, so maybe you can give advice about the kind of project
most suitable for learning.

What I've seen about Caml has wet my a
>ettite and I'm sure I'll be
starving soon :) It promises being the elegant and powerful language I
was looking for. I've been using C/C++, Delphi, Lua, Java, Ruby, PHP,
etc. last years and I was starting with Python lately, but I got in
touch with
>aml and I think we're going to keep together for a while
:)

Cheers, and please excuse my english.

--
Joaquin Bernal
jobe@baara.com

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Re: [Caml-list] Saying hi and the most basic question

[Benjamin Geer]

Joaquin Bernal wrote:
> Are there any tutorials or
> books available for download (english or spanish) besides Michael
> Mauny's "Functional Programing using Caml Light" and the OCaml 3.07
> Reference Manual itself?

The O'Reilly book _Developing Applications with Objective Caml_ is 
excellent:

http://caml.inria.fr/oreilly-book/

You'll find several tutorials here:

http://caml.inria.fr/tutorials-eng.html

 > maybe you can give advice about the kind of project
 > most suitable for learning.

I think there's something to be said for doing a type of project that 
you've done before in another language, so that you already have a 
pretty good idea of how to proceed, and can focus on the language itself.

You might also be interested in the ocaml-beginners mailing list:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners

Ben

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Re: [Caml-list] Saying hi and the most basic question

[Dustin Sallings]

On Dec 12, 2003, at 9:36, Joaquin Bernal wrote:

> Hi all. I've just subscribed to the list (most redundant sentence
> ever) so I'm dropping the first question. Are there any tutorials or
> books available for download (english or spanish) besides Michael
> Mauny's "Functional Programing using Caml Light" and the OCaml 3.07
> Reference Manual itself?

	Besides the ora reference, I've found this book to be pretty good:

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/courses/cs134/cs134b/book.pdf

> Besides that, what was your first project using Caml? I'd like to
> start mine, so maybe you can give advice about the kind of project
> most suitable for learning.

	I had a few data processing utilities I rewrote.  The original 
versions were written in python and just weren't fast enough for the 
amount of data I was getting daily (well, they were, but it took a 
couple of hours to process everything).  I started looking for other 
languages that would provide better performance.  In my early tests, 
bigloo scheme and ocaml processed one of my data sets in approximately 
the same amount of time.  I went with bigloo for a while because I was 
familiar with scheme and very uncomfortable in ocaml.

	After a while, and with added complexity, I started having both 
performance and stability problems with the bigloo version of my 
processor pilot.  I had some trouble growing the thing as well.

	I decided to give ocaml another go and found that it was insanely 
fast, and completely solid.  Since then, I've been trying to figure out 
what apps I can rewrite.  When I can't rewrite an app, I build 
libraries I figure I'll need later (file processing stuff, auto-filling 
lru cache, cdb, base64, etc...).  It's a lot more fun than my day job.  
:)  (of course, I use ocaml in my day job as well)

--
SPY                      My girlfriend asked me which one I like better.
pub  1024/3CAE01D5 1994/11/03 Dustin Sallings <dustin@spy.net>
|    Key fingerprint =  87 02 57 08 02 D0 DA D6  C8 0F 3E 65 51 98 D8 BE
L_______________________ I hope the answer won't upset her. ____________

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