The funniest thing ever

Ruby
21

On Tue, 13 Feb 2007, Martin DeMello wrote:

On 2/10/07, [email protected] [email protected] wrote:

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~mvanier/hacking/rants/scalable_computer_programming_languages.html

my favourite quote from that article was lispnik Martin Rodgers’s

Will write code that writes code that writes code for food.

yeah - i though about stealing that one!

-a

22

On Tue, 13 Feb 2007, Richard C. wrote:

attention.

If the base
language package contains nearly nothing, that’s an advantage.

Agreed. But if I didn’t make it clear, my main concern was the availability
of libraries for common development tasks, like database development,
network comms protocols (particularly secure ones). etc.

Yeah, this is getting more than a bit OT, but (O)Caml is interesting.

it’s OT - but not that OT. here’s why

http://sciruby.codeforpeople.com/sr.cgi/ProjectIdeas/RubyOCaml?highlight=(ocaml)

could be a beautiful thing…

-a

23

On 2/13/07, Tim P. [email protected] wrote:

On 2/13/07, Richard C. [email protected] wrote:

On 2/13/07, Clifford H. [email protected] wrote:

Richard C. wrote:

It has some fantastic features at the language
design level. We are talking drool-worthy. And absolutely no library
to speak of.

And you have to love the Ruby community

Well, I do :slight_smile:

where an off-topic humor

thread starts espousing the wonders of the ocaml language. I remember
a similar thing happening on a previous thread comparing Ruby and
Python. It, too, ended up discussing how the wonders of ocaml.

But is that not a well known law(n)?
42nd law of the dynamics of language discussion:
All discussions eventually orbit O?Caml!

TwP

Robert

24

42nd law of the dynamics of language discussion:
All discussions eventually orbit O?Caml!

The same publisher that released “Practical Common Lisp” recently
released “Practical OCaml.” I’ve been wondering ever since I
discovered this whether it means OCaml has gradually become more
useful in a pragmatic sense, or if it simply represents one isolated
individual publisher with a very unusual definition of “practical.”

25

On 2/13/07, Giles B. [email protected] wrote:

42nd law of the dynamics of language discussion:
All discussions eventually orbit O?Caml!

The same publisher that released “Practical Common Lisp” recently
released “Practical OCaml.” I’ve been wondering ever since I
discovered this whether it means OCaml has gradually become more
useful in a pragmatic sense, or if it simply represents one isolated
individual publisher with a very unusual definition of “practical.”

I think much of the recent interest is due to a lot of big OSS projects
taking interest in it. Possibly the Mozilla group. Its the fusion of
ideas
that is most interesting:

  • C-like nativeness, performance and compile-to-everything
  • Memory management and runtime integrity with the implied security
    that entails - features normally associated with Java
  • Dynamic language benefits, like low-LOCs and implied maintenance
    reduction, type inference and lots of funky language-isms that I don’t
    really
    understand, that all the cool kids are into

It has the potential to carve out a significant niche for itself. Sure
if you
are intimidated by new languages look elsewhere, if you need the
‘reassurance’ of a corporate sponsor you won’t find it here either, but
it has a lot of potential in the open source field, and anywhere really
that you need portable cross compilation.

Mind you, in this day and age when its getting hard to make Win 32
code that runs on windows anymore, theres opportunities there too.

26

I know Jane St. Capital is using OCaml extensively in financial
trading apps, because I can’t use Gmail without ads reminding me. It’s
definitely in production for some uses.

27

David M. [email protected] writes:

think the article is well worth reading.

I have to disagree with the paper a bit. It seems that the author is
evaluating languages in a vacuum without practical considerations…
typical for academia.

If he likes OCAML so much, is there a mod_ocaml for apache?

Yes.

are there MIME, SMTP, IMAP libraries available?

Yes, yes, maybe not but none of these are quite rocket science so why
do you care?

Is there a a nice framework like Rails to build with?

Well probably since it seems to be the only killer app in the world
and what every language zealot wants to copy. There is probably also
a framework that was designed to take advantage of the strengths of
the language instead of merely regurgitating another *ails.

(just picking on it because the author likes it so much. I’ve never
used OCAML)

The pragmatic side of me says I don’t have time to look at a language
that can’t get the job done. (even if you add “yet” to that).

The Pragmatic side of me says learn a language a year.

Steve