5 ms·

"the next great thing will be more like ML" ocaML or even better F#?

by CmonDev 12y ago

progman 12y ago
I wonder if Ocaml is actually much more practical than Haskell. Ocaml has been proven to be well usable in industry while Haskell seems to be suitable for research areas like math and language design. http://mirror.ocamlcore.org/wiki.cocan.org/companies.html http://mirror.ocamlcore.org/wiki.cocan.org/companies.html http://www.infoq.com/presentations/jane-street-caml-ocaml http://www.infoq.com/presentations/jane-street-caml-ocaml http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2038036&ref=fullrss http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2038036&ref=fullrss
- ZenoArrow 12y ago
  I'm learning F# right now, it's flipping excellent! From what I understand it's similar to Ocaml, but has some other features that give it the edge (for me at least). I did try to learn Ocaml at one point, but I was put off by the standard library variation (the default one apparently has numerous shortcomings, Batteries project extends it and Core project aims to replace it, but neither one is the clear winner) and the lack of extensive parallel processing support (coming soon... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzmQTC_X5R4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzmQTC_X5R4 ). F# comes with a sensible default library (including Unicode support as default), some nice syntactic sugar (the pipe forward operator is especially useful, and to be fair it has made it into Ocaml now too... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8986010/is-it-possible-to-use-pipes-in-ocaml http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8986010/is-it-possible-to... ), seamless interoperability with all .NET libraries, and parallel processing is made comparatively easy (for example, if performing a map operation over a list, can just change the List.map function to Parallel.map to get the parallel version). This is probably the F# introduction I would recommend the most (it's a video, which I know isn't ideal, but it's a good one): http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/pdc2008/TL11 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/pdc2008/TL11 Oh and type providers in F# blew my mind! I can't really summarise them yet, but imagine being able to mix Python or R or many other data sources in with F#. If anyone has a good introductory post on type providers, please feel free to share.
  - progman 12y ago
    Thanks a lot for these infos! Unfortunately F# is .NET only. Linux requires Mono for installation which means a lot of dependencies. I prefer small efficient solutions (Nimrod for instance). OCaml works out of the box on my system.
    - CmonDev 12y ago
      Rare language has both .Net and JVM support, probably only Clojure now. On the upside you can build iOS and Android apps using F# plus many other gaming platforms.
      - ZenoArrow 12y ago
        Clojure is far from the only language that supports both the JVM and CLR. I had a long reply ready, but I lost it. Off the top of my head the languages that have support on both (aside from Clojure) are; Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Java (though J# is being depreciated), Scheme, Common Lisp, PHP, Perl 6, Prolog, Pascal, Ada. I might be missing some.
        CmonDev 12y ago
        That's impressive, but I kind of dismissed some of them as scripting languages.
    - ZenoArrow 12y ago
      OCaml is nice too, it's just not for me. If you like OCaml you should definitely check out Mirage OS, it will fit into your small efficient systems ethos nicely... http://www.openmirage.org/ http://www.openmirage.org/
- imanaccount247 12y ago
  No, that's the weird mythology that gets passed around by people who haven't used both languages. I used ocaml for 4 years and switched to haskell precisely because it is more practical.

"the next great thing will be more like ML" ocaML or even better F#?

by CmonDev 12y ago

"the next great thing will be more like ML" ocaML or even better F#?

I wonder if Ocaml is actually much more practical than Haskell. Ocaml has been proven to be well usable in industry while Haskell seems to be suitable for research areas like math and language design. http://mirror.ocamlcore.org/wiki.cocan.org/companies.html http://mirror.ocamlcore.org/wiki.cocan.org/companies.html http://www.infoq.com/presentations/jane-street-caml-ocaml http://www.infoq.com/presentations/jane-street-caml-ocaml http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2038036&ref=fullrss http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2038036&ref=fullrss

ZenoArrow 12y ago
I'm learning F# right now, it's flipping excellent! From what I understand it's similar to Ocaml, but has some other features that give it the edge (for me at least). I did try to learn Ocaml at one point, but I was put off by the standard library variation (the default one apparently has numerous shortcomings, Batteries project extends it and Core project aims to replace it, but neither one is the clear winner) and the lack of extensive parallel processing support (coming soon... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzmQTC_X5R4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzmQTC_X5R4 ). F# comes with a sensible default library (including Unicode support as default), some nice syntactic sugar (the pipe forward operator is especially useful, and to be fair it has made it into Ocaml now too... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8986010/is-it-possible-to-use-pipes-in-ocaml http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8986010/is-it-possible-to... ), seamless interoperability with all .NET libraries, and parallel processing is made comparatively easy (for example, if performing a map operation over a list, can just change the List.map function to Parallel.map to get the parallel version). This is probably the F# introduction I would recommend the most (it's a video, which I know isn't ideal, but it's a good one): http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/pdc2008/TL11 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/pdc2008/TL11 Oh and type providers in F# blew my mind! I can't really summarise them yet, but imagine being able to mix Python or R or many other data sources in with F#. If anyone has a good introductory post on type providers, please feel free to share.
- progman 12y ago
  Thanks a lot for these infos! Unfortunately F# is .NET only. Linux requires Mono for installation which means a lot of dependencies. I prefer small efficient solutions (Nimrod for instance). OCaml works out of the box on my system.
  - CmonDev 12y ago
    Rare language has both .Net and JVM support, probably only Clojure now. On the upside you can build iOS and Android apps using F# plus many other gaming platforms.
    - ZenoArrow 12y ago
      Clojure is far from the only language that supports both the JVM and CLR. I had a long reply ready, but I lost it. Off the top of my head the languages that have support on both (aside from Clojure) are; Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Java (though J# is being depreciated), Scheme, Common Lisp, PHP, Perl 6, Prolog, Pascal, Ada. I might be missing some.
      - CmonDev 12y ago
        That's impressive, but I kind of dismissed some of them as scripting languages.
  - ZenoArrow 12y ago
    OCaml is nice too, it's just not for me. If you like OCaml you should definitely check out Mirage OS, it will fit into your small efficient systems ethos nicely... http://www.openmirage.org/ http://www.openmirage.org/
imanaccount247 12y ago
No, that's the weird mythology that gets passed around by people who haven't used both languages. I used ocaml for 4 years and switched to haskell precisely because it is more practical.