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OCaml For the Masses
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.'"
This is why I think Scala will succeed.
Scala has all the advantages that the article mentions AND you can integrate and reuse your old Java or .NET code and libraries.
It's there. The tooling doesn't suck half bad anymore. The world just needs to find out.
I personally think that Scala will win over the 10% best Java programmers as soon as the tooling is comparable to Javas.
And that might happen within the next 1-2 years.
'The importance of concision is clear: other things being equal, shorter code is easier to read, easier to write, and easier to maintain.'
But there's the rub. Other things are not equal. Functional languages require the developer to approach problems with an entirely different mindset. There is a steep learning curve to really understand how they work. And I'm not talking about just the syntax. Functional languages are fundamentally different than procedural languages. Truly understanding how they work requires a lot more brainpower than procedural languages.
While it's admirable to espouse what you see to be a more elegant and "better" solution, you need to be pragmatic. Getting the millions of software developers in the world to put the effort to completely change their way of thinking just isn't going to happen. The cost/benefit ratio is questionable at best, given that a lot of people could train for a long time and still have difficulty with the basic concepts of functional languages.
Procedural languages are the norm because they're a lot simpler. Procedural languages (including "C with classes" and the like that masquerade for OOP/OOD) are useful to many more people simply because there is less to understand about how they work. It's easier for people to approach problem solution in a procedural way than it is for them to think about it functionally. And that's why functional languages, no matter how elegant or "great" they may be, will never really break into the mainstream.
Yeah, every now and then I've known someone who firmly believed we should all be writing in Haskell and the like.
Mostly it seems like they're suggesting it because they're geeky people who like some of the features they claim the language has, and because this meets some level of mathematical elegance that resonates with them.
My recollection of functional programming from university was that it was kind cute, seemed to be geared to solving a problem domain I never found a use for, but that ultimately I hated the syntax and structure of it. I never really "got it", or really understood what it was supposed to be useful for.
Other than someone doing an Othello game in lisp, I'm not sure I've ever actually seen these languages used for anything ... at least, not outside of AI type things or university.
But, that was a long time ago. To me it's mostly theorists talking about how clean and pretty the code is, but it just doesn't seem like it's all that useful in the real world.
And, really, let's face it ... I don't recall ever seeing "wanted, one haskell programmer". So, do people actually use it for commercial software?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
My favorite code to read is OOP stuff written by coders who understand and make use of functional programming concepts. They know how to write things that are stateless when that makes sense, and use state in an appropriate manner when that makes sense.
And yes, by all means use it when appropriate. But don't think that Lisp is always the right language for scripting your text editor (dodges blow from Emacs partisan).
I am officially gone from
F# is essentially OCaml for .Net, so you get the full access to the .Net library. Also the best thing about F#, in my opinion, is since it is a .Net language, you can mix and match it with C#. So you can use functional approach for most part of your program, yet drop to C# when you require.
We have found the problem with the software business.
Bad news: It's you and your 100,000,000 ignorant & unwilling to learn clones.
you had me at #!
Ah, and I forgot, F# 3 will have type providers, which gives you a hook into the compiler to provide types however you please. It is mostly used to create statically-typed elements from a dynamic resource such as a cloud database.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.