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I created an account just to ask, what is the fetish and obsession with OCaml and functional stuff on here? Does anyone actually write it (besides Erlang)? OCa

by risk2030 7y ago

I created an account just to ask, what is the fetish and obsession with OCaml and functional stuff on here? Does anyone actually write it (besides Erlang)? OCaml specifically is such an obscure language you'd have a hard time explaining it to most people who are software engineers. Who cares?

monocasa 7y ago
Jane Street really loves OCaml. A lot of formal verification tools play nicely with OCaml too.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  AFAK Intel used to have some kind of formal verification, either Haskell or OCaml based for their chips, but I am not having much luck with my Google-fu.
wk_end 7y ago
Facebook uses Ocaml in the form of Reason, they're a pretty big deal. I think they also use Haskell? Lots of financial companies, including some serious heavy-hitters like Bloomberg, use functional languages like Haskell and Ocaml. I suppose the blockchain folks are pretty enamoured with it too. Plenty of big companies like Twitter use Scala, which is plenty functional. Even on the front-end side: JavaScript was directly inspired by Scheme; TypeScript was hugely inspired by languages like Ocaml and Haskell; React and Redux's inspirations fall directly out of the functional programming community. Rust, out of Mozilla, is also a descendent of the functional programming world; its compiler was originally written in Ocaml. Just the other day there was a conversation on here about type-system enforced optionals. Almost every "modern" language has grown these in the past decade, often including monadic combinators to help minimize boilerplate. All of this comes from what ML and Haskell were doing as many as 30 years ago. Speaking of monadic combinators: these are also frequently used in modern languages with async libraries to avoid what the JS community termed "callback hell". TBH if you've developed software in the past ten years, it's unlikely you haven't been hugely affected by what the FP community has been doing, and it's not impossible that watching what they're doing now give you a glimpse of where mainstream programming will be a decade or more down the line.
- terminaljunkid 7y ago
  > "TBH if you've developed software in the past ten years, it's unlikely you haven't been hugely affected by what the FP community has been doing." Apart from HN / reddit bubble, not many people know about FP, and not to imply that's their fault. FP is still weird, difficult for mere mortals, and ivory tower elitism is holding some of its useful ideas back.
  - sideeffffect 7y ago
    people are doing FP, or using ideas originating in FP without even knowing it: * Java/C# generics * sealed interfaces and record classes * pattern matching * first-class functions with closures * even type system itself (eg Python is gaining a type system) * ... The world of programming languages is converging, no matter how slowly, towards ML https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/talks/mlw13.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/talks/mlw13.pdf
    - terminaljunkid 7y ago
      Half of those things aren't even specific to FP. And I bet most people don't even use pattern matching outside HN / reddit bubble, not to say it isn't cool.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Well, most Portuguese students with university degree in Informatics happen to have been exposed to FP and LP during their 5 year degree (or 3 + 2 as they usually do it nowadays). Given that most HR departments still value having a degree, that is still quite a bit of people, specially if one extrapolates to other countries that share similar attitude to universities and HR hiring practices.
TheAsprngHacker 7y ago
I'm using OCaml to make my own programming language. OCaml is good for programming language implementation because algebraic data types + pattern matching lend themselves naturally to AST manipulation. I also like OCaml because it is both imperative and functional, so I can use the best of both paradigms.

monocasa 7y ago

Jane Street really loves OCaml. A lot of formal verification tools play nicely with OCaml too.

pjmlp 7y ago
AFAK Intel used to have some kind of formal verification, either Haskell or OCaml based for their chips, but I am not having much luck with my Google-fu.

wk_end 7y ago

Facebook uses Ocaml in the form of Reason, they're a pretty big deal. I think they also use Haskell? Lots of financial companies, including some serious heavy-hitters like Bloomberg, use functional languages like Haskell and Ocaml. I suppose the blockchain folks are pretty enamoured with it too. Plenty of big companies like Twitter use Scala, which is plenty functional. Even on the front-end side: JavaScript was directly inspired by Scheme; TypeScript was hugely inspired by languages like Ocaml and Haskell; React and Redux's inspirations fall directly out of the functional programming community. Rust, out of Mozilla, is also a descendent of the functional programming world; its compiler was originally written in Ocaml. Just the other day there was a conversation on here about type-system enforced optionals. Almost every "modern" language has grown these in the past decade, often including monadic combinators to help minimize boilerplate. All of this comes from what ML and Haskell were doing as many as 30 years ago. Speaking of monadic combinators: these are also frequently used in modern languages with async libraries to avoid what the JS community termed "callback hell". TBH if you've developed software in the past ten years, it's unlikely you haven't been hugely affected by what the FP community has been doing, and it's not impossible that watching what they're doing now give you a glimpse of where mainstream programming will be a decade or more down the line.

terminaljunkid 7y ago
> "TBH if you've developed software in the past ten years, it's unlikely you haven't been hugely affected by what the FP community has been doing." Apart from HN / reddit bubble, not many people know about FP, and not to imply that's their fault. FP is still weird, difficult for mere mortals, and ivory tower elitism is holding some of its useful ideas back.
- sideeffffect 7y ago
  people are doing FP, or using ideas originating in FP without even knowing it: * Java/C# generics * sealed interfaces and record classes * pattern matching * first-class functions with closures * even type system itself (eg Python is gaining a type system) * ... The world of programming languages is converging, no matter how slowly, towards ML https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/talks/mlw13.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/talks/mlw13.pdf
  - terminaljunkid 7y ago
    Half of those things aren't even specific to FP. And I bet most people don't even use pattern matching outside HN / reddit bubble, not to say it isn't cool.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Well, most Portuguese students with university degree in Informatics happen to have been exposed to FP and LP during their 5 year degree (or 3 + 2 as they usually do it nowadays). Given that most HR departments still value having a degree, that is still quite a bit of people, specially if one extrapolates to other countries that share similar attitude to universities and HR hiring practices.

TheAsprngHacker 7y ago

I'm using OCaml to make my own programming language. OCaml is good for programming language implementation because algebraic data types + pattern matching lend themselves naturally to AST manipulation. I also like OCaml because it is both imperative and functional, so I can use the best of both paradigms.