Re: thoughts on OCaml?

["Andrew Gwozdziewycz" <apgwoz@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 11:29 AM, Kyle R. Burton <kyle.burton@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Does anyone on the list have experience with OCaml? Likes, dislikes?
>
> No, but it's on my 'list'.  I have the Practical OCaml book, which
> looks to be a good introduction.

It's been on my list for a while too. But, it's getting pushed up the
list this summer due to a class in the fall...

> I know that Janestreet uses it b/c they have a recruitment ad that
> shows up at the top of my gmail on a regular basis.  They also have a blog:
>

They gave a talk recently at Penn. I missed it due to some random
scheduling conflict.

>   http://ocaml.janestcapital.com/
>
> ledit is a cool utility that comes with OCaml that wraps readline like
> support around any other command (which is something I typically used
> emacs shell mode for previously).
>

This exists in another binary as well, but ledit is nice.

> The shootout numbers for OCaml are impressive and one of the things
> that lead me to explore FP in the first place.
>
> One thing I'm curious about - with both Haskell and OCaml, the
> languages which are strongly statically typed - this philosophy seems
> to be at odds with code re-use and the development of library code to
> a certain extent.  It seems to lead toward monolithic programs.

I've played with Haskell only a little, so this is my first attempt at
really getting to know a strongly static typed language. I'm not sure
how I feel about it, as I abandoned static typing a while ago...

What
> I'm getting at is, with many of teh languages I'm familiar with you
> can define a plugin API and load plugins at runtime (eg, using a
> classloader in Java, eval in many other languages, Perl's 'do', etc.).
>  Know what I'm getting at?  Have any experience with it?  Maybe I just
> need to see (or make) a larger scale system with one of these
> languages (though I don't yet know how I'm going to get that
> opportunity atm).
>
> I can see how it'd work with Erlang, at least I think, with the whole
> message passing paradigm, that makes for a clean decoupling where you
> can swap in/out module.  I'm not seeing how that works with Haskell or
> OCaml (just as two examples).

If i ever come up with a solution to this, I'll let you know....

thanks for the thoughts.

-- 
Andrew Gwozdziewycz
apgwoz@gmail.com
http://www.apgwoz.com | http://www.photub.com