

Why OCaml? - ahalan
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Software/Ocaml/why_ocaml.html

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gtani
relatively recent discussions

[http://www.reddit.com/r/ocaml/comments/fmpl8/i_have_yet_to_l...](http://www.reddit.com/r/ocaml/comments/fmpl8/i_have_yet_to_learn_a_functional_programming/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/gd4xq/james_gos...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/gd4xq/james_gosling_joins_google/c1mrz65)

[http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/pros-and-cons-
of-...](http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/pros-and-cons-of-
ocaml.html)

[http://groups.google.com/group/sayeret-
lambda/browse_frm/thr...](http://groups.google.com/group/sayeret-
lambda/browse_frm/thread/56cd32eb7459004f)

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mathgladiator
Looking at the shootout, it would seem that the Java 7 stuff is rocking the
house. Hrmm, now when Java gets real non-blocking IO, this will be very
interesting.

Also, this article is from 2002.

OCaml losing its luster to me as I age. I just wrote down counter-points to
this article: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2983248>

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timclark
If F# worked well on Mono I would be using F# for a lot of my work, and F#
isn't a million miles away from being OCAML.

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darklajid
What doesn't work?

As far as I know that combination is working fine and even supported/embraced
by the teams involved?

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gtani
I've been meaning to try this. In meantime: Only 1 critical open ticket:

[https://bugzilla.novell.com/buglist.cgi?query_format=specifi...](https://bugzilla.novell.com/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__all__&product=Mono%3A+Runtime&content=f%23)

Not a lot volume on google group and stackoverflow

<http://groups.google.com/group/fsharp-opensource/topics>

<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/mono+f%23>

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kia
The article is from 2002. I think now Haskel might be the best alternative. In
2002 though OCaml tools were probably better and more mature than Haskel ones.

~~~
zimbatm
I find that the Haskell language is too vast to be directly useful to me. It
appeals to my programming language fetish, which is a curse when I want to get
something done. I rapidly end up devising between different ways of laying my
types down, which is brain-gasmic, instead of how to get a result. And in the
end I find out that it's not efficient enough and that I have to re-write the
program with less "pureness" to get some juice out of it.

In contrast, OCaml's syntax and model is quite simple. The IO is not pure but
at least I don't have to choose between 20 different ways to do it. There is
not as much activity in the community but at least you don't get distracted by
the latest monad library. For somebody who just want to crunch numbers, I
think it is a good choice.

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radarsat1
> ML is a strong, statically-typed version of Lisp.

Meh? How so?

~~~
jallmann
The author explained why.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_inference>

~~~
stonemetal
Not to put words in other people's mouth but I believe he is more concerned
with 'version of Lisp' than the 'statically-typed' part. It is kind of like
saying basic is an interpreted version of C. The two languages are more or
less unrelated outside of the fact that both are impure functional programming
languages.

