Page 2 - Why learn OCaml?

*nod* I invented that syntax, VB isn't flexible enough to allow it.

I remember when i tried to make RPG in VB6.
Damn... i was a stupid kid.


You could get rich. Just remove the goto, and sell the compiler &| IDE under some other name.

I actually wrote an RPG/MUD in VB6, it worked even when you had like 40 people on it (we never got more than that but i doubt it could handle any further load, I was using an array of winsock controls)

OCaml could be considered better than C# simply because it does more than just OO; specifically it has good support for functional programming and all of the implied benefits.

Added to this you can ignore type declaration if you want, giving you the flexibility of dynamic typing and the supposed safety strict type systems provide. The choice is all yours.

Combining these features means you don't write all the boiler plate you have to write in C# to produce something as simple as the "hello world" program for example .


As for the speed OCaml is very close to C++ in this unoptimized test, so chances are that it's much faster than C#.

http://www.ffconsultancy.com/free/ray_tracer/languages.html

As a point of interest I heard rumors a while ago that .NET was written in OCaml; not that I know whether this is true or not .

Take care,

Mark.

OCaml faster than C#?
I'm gonna spend few years living in cave on the top of mountain to forget i've heard this...

If OCaml is so good, then why doesn't everyone use it? Maybe because it's new (if it is).

Does it have support for GUIs? I don't wanna spend time learning it to do console stuff.

It has incomplete gtk bindings, a google revealed, but then so does everything but gtk itself. OCaML isn't as well known as C and C++ and i presume that's why it's not used as much, that and people like C syntax for some reason.

I hate GTK look...

Gtk doesn't really have a look, at least on *nix, that depends on the other options.

OCaml will never be as popular simply because it isn't standard, or based on a industry standard language. This is really the main reason that good languages get ignored.

So how do you become an industry standard? In the most general sense you throw enough money at the problem to convince the pointy headed bosses that they need to use your language. Then, when businesses want programmers for X the programmers get it into there heads that this language must better than the rest, and set about learning it.

Because there are more programmers using X in the industry those companies that didn't just jump on X before flock to it. This is how you get an industry standard like Java - Smalltalk is far more powerful and preforms very well, that didn't matter when Sun set it's advertising machine to work.

It all comes down to money, not the respective properties of the language, and it's circular.

You can't go wrong with a standard language, or at least if you do you wont be blamed for it. If you don't get blamed then you wont be fired, in theory.


If the industry wasn't so fickle then Lisp (or Lisp-like languages) may well be on the top of the stack, being at the top of the language power continuum

If this was the case then software would be an order of magnitude safer and we could finally escape the problems inherent in C-family languages: ridged structure and poor abstraction etc.


Applicative programming produce better results, this much has been [more or less] proven through statistical analysis but there isn't as far as I know an industry standard functional language yet*.

Instead everyone is absorbed by OO programming, when it should be noted that a powerful module system solves most of the same problems.

Through OO all you've really done is localize the well known problems typically found in imperative/procedural languages - particularly those related to state.


Anyway, I hope this has been interesting .

Mark.


*Instead companies like Microsoft have spent millions on research into functional programming in the hope of raping it's better qualities. To date this has pretty much failed .

Have a look at the Great Computer shootout, it has comparitive scores for different languages including Ocaml & C#.

Language Score Miss Fail Avg
Ocaml ocamlb 630 0 3 28.64
C# csharp 574 4 0 27.33

Ocamls been around since 1985 ish.

Ocaml has quite a few different gui binding. Look here
for a list.

Displeaser

I don't know about that...their interest in FP and hiring people like Erik Meijer has had quite a few concrete results, like LINQ. As you know, functional languages are part of the cutting edge of language design and I know they've been the Next Big Thing for a very long time, but I really think they are the Next Big (Quiet) Thing in that the most powerful features drip into mainstream languages, maybe at an increasing rate, which is great but the average programmer isn't going to be switching to Haskell. This of course is just the long process of all languages becoming Lisp...

This is interesting... i'll consider learning OCaml.

A word of caution for the Ocaml 'evolution', if you will.
There are several limitations to the language that might be of concern to you down the road.<