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Actually I think there is a distinction to be made. Both Haskell and OCaml are strongly typed ML-family languages, and to some extent you'll find some overlap i

Actually I think there is a distinction to be made. Both Haskell and OCaml are strongly typed ML-family languages, and to some extent you'll find some overlap in community interests, trending toward the academic side. But Haskell tends to be used more for type theory research, whereas OCaml is far more popular for programming language research due to its popularity for writing compilers. While I don't have internal insight to Jane Street, some of their talks and public information seems to support the idea that they are actually doing a lot of similar work to compiler development. They have stated that they tend to do a lot of symbolic logic and analysis, and they make it sound like they create DSLs that traders can more easily use to convey trading strategies. So OCaml does really well at getting things done, but historically it has been within very narrow definition of the types of things to be done.

yminsky 6y ago
Understandable how you'd get that impression, but it's off the mark. We do lots of "ordinary" programming that looks nothing like waiting a compiler. Data analysis, high performance packet processing, log analysis, UI work, you name it. We use OCaml as a general purpose tool, and it really excels in that role.
- pbiggar 6y ago
  I think the disconnect here is that for much of the world these days, "ordinary" programming is a backend for a web or mobile app, using REST (or maybe GraphQL if you're avant garde). I'm sure Jane Street does lots of web stuff too, but I haven't see a bunch of Core libraries to do, for example, a CRUD app on Postgres in the cloud somewhere.
- darksaints 6y ago
  Interesting. I've always wanted to dig deeper into OCaml but haven't really had the chance to do so yet. I really enjoy a lot of what I've read about your work with OCaml and it looks like a great place to work for someone like me (4 years of automated trading experience in futures markets and a love of strongly-typed functional programming), but alas I'm not in a position to relocate from Seattle.
- zeckalpha 6y ago
  Hmm. All programs are either compilers or repls. Log analysis compiles logs into an analysis. A GUI repls user interactions. It all has to do with how you define the abstractions.

yminsky 6y ago

Understandable how you'd get that impression, but it's off the mark. We do lots of "ordinary" programming that looks nothing like waiting a compiler. Data analysis, high performance packet processing, log analysis, UI work, you name it. We use OCaml as a general purpose tool, and it really excels in that role.

pbiggar 6y ago
I think the disconnect here is that for much of the world these days, "ordinary" programming is a backend for a web or mobile app, using REST (or maybe GraphQL if you're avant garde). I'm sure Jane Street does lots of web stuff too, but I haven't see a bunch of Core libraries to do, for example, a CRUD app on Postgres in the cloud somewhere.
darksaints 6y ago
Interesting. I've always wanted to dig deeper into OCaml but haven't really had the chance to do so yet. I really enjoy a lot of what I've read about your work with OCaml and it looks like a great place to work for someone like me (4 years of automated trading experience in futures markets and a love of strongly-typed functional programming), but alas I'm not in a position to relocate from Seattle.
zeckalpha 6y ago
Hmm. All programs are either compilers or repls. Log analysis compiles logs into an analysis. A GUI repls user interactions. It all has to do with how you define the abstractions.