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OCaml For the Masses

Posted by timothy on from the cue-up-the-language-bigots dept.

CowboyRobot writes "Yaron Minsky of Jane Street argues that the time has come for statically-typed functional languages like OCaml and Haskell. He cites many reasons and illustrates what he says is the most important, concision: 'The importance of concision is clear: other things being equal, shorter code is easier to read, easier to write, and easier to maintain.'"

3 of 338 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Give me a call when... by tuffy · · Score: 2, Informative

    Both Ocaml and Haskell can compile directly to native machine code and aren't tied to decrepit virtual machines. In particular, Haskell's compiler is written in Haskell for optimal bootstrappy fun.

    --

    Ita erat quando hic adveni.

  2. Re:Give me a call when... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    You mean like right now? Haskell's pretty mature, and it's been able to compile to native code for years. It's pretty straight forward to talk to C (the universal ABI) with Haskell (well, as straight forward as anything is in Haskell).

    OCaml has been mature for nearly a decade, by the way. Without the success it's had, languages such as Haskell and F# wouldn't be around. It also can compile to native code, and has been able to since inception.

    PS, the .NET VM isn't really decrepit, it's much more performant than the JVM is. Sadly, mono isn't nearly as mature as the actual .NET virtual machine.

  3. Re:Two line summary of TFA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I have the perfect hammer.

    Would that be the C family of languages used all over the place?