

ML Family Workshop - mrry
http://www.syslog.cl.cam.ac.uk/2014/09/05/ml-family-workshop/

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cheepin
I found the Rust video pretty informative. Rust, for better or worse, is
already pretty complex, but this gave a really nice high level overview of
some of its more important features.

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ML2014links
link to videos (search "ML Family 2014"):
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP9g4dLR7xt6KzCYntNqYcw/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP9g4dLR7xt6KzCYntNqYcw/videos)

links to papers:
[http://okmij.org/ftp/ML/ML14.html](http://okmij.org/ftp/ML/ML14.html)

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jpswade
[http://archive.today/xbbhf](http://archive.today/xbbhf)

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jUqSHE3...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jUqSHE32LSAJ:www.syslog.cl.cam.ac.uk/2014/09/05/ml-
family-workshop/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk)

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mhd
Seems to me that Ocaml is really dominating this. Whatever happened to SMLNJ,
MLTon and consorts?

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pjmlp
OCaml has industry presence and is big in Europe universities.

I seldom hear about the others except on research papers.

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shassan
website down.

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theoh
Disappointed that this wasn't actually a workshop for families. Cambridge used
to use (still uses?) ML as a first language for CS undergrads, making its
obscurity a strength (it is a new experience for most students).

I see one of the abstracts talks about a "classless society" as a pun relating
to object orientation. This makes me groan a bit, as there seems to be a
general tendency in FP to make superficial quips, puns or observations like
this while the community of FP programmers remains totally divorced from
reality.

A good example is the notorious video interview
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ)
in which Simon Peyton Jones laments the fact that pure functional programming
languages just make the CPU heat up and nothing else (i.e. they have no useful
side effects.) He probably wasn't being completely ingenuous but it comes
across as a lack of self-awareness: FP is all about calculation and
expressions, the program is an input and the value it evaluates to is the
output... That's all you can expect. You need some other paradigm to "do"
things, IO monads notwithstanding.

Conan Elliot has a fun blog post on the c preprocessor which dances around
this issue a bit: [http://conal.net/blog/posts/the-c-language-is-purely-
functio...](http://conal.net/blog/posts/the-c-language-is-purely-functional)

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samth
Andreas' comment is not about OO at all. It's about the second-class status of
modules in ML, where the 1ML design that he described in the talk makes
modules first-class values.

And is your claim really that people in the functional programming community
shouldn't make jokes in their talks until FP lives up to your notion of
practicality? How many banks need to use Haskell, how many switches need to
run on Erlang, etc etc, until you're satisfied?

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theoh
Actually, for what it's worth, it's the widely accepted status of FP as a kind
of elite ghetto that I was alluding to, rather than its practicality. I'm not
the first to comment on that, and not the best placed to know how to fix it,
but, you know, I was musing on what it might be like to have an ML family
event involving kids learning functional programming. Something a bit "soft"
rather than relentless logic and category theory.

~~~
samth
Actually, there was no category theory at the ML workshop. And the particular
complaints you made were based on misunderstanding Andreas' joke, and on being
annoyed that FP people are playful while being an "elite ghetto". The
particular example of someone who makes a joke, Simon Peyton-Jones, has spent
the last several years pushing computing into every elementary school in the
UK.

