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.'"

Comments

Re:haskell for the masses? sure, but only...

[gstoddart]

The big problem is that in a lot of programs you need more than just the pure functions; you need I/O and other side-effects.

See, a computer language without IO is generally something which doesn't do anything useful. If all they are is something which is elegant and pretty, it's hard not to write them off as something that academics crow over but which have no actual value.

Obviously, that's a gross overstatement, but usually I get the impression that people fawn over it because it's pretty and plays into a certain aesthetic that only a very few people I've ever known are swayed by.

Mostly it was a former co-worker who occasionally got the notion in his head that everything we'd done over the last few years should be thrown away and started from scratch, because he had read something in an academic journal that made him rethink the world and that we were All Horribly Wrong and that he'd Seen The Light.

Obviously, management and other people mostly treated it as an academic indulgence and told him that what he said was great in theory, but had no relation to the real world. It was mostly about how elegant the language would be, and how it would solve a bunch of issues which nobody had identified as needing to be solved.

In no way shape or form did it relate to the actual shipping products we had, what we were trying to accomplish, or how we actually generated revenue. Eventually when he brought up the topic, people just tuned him out. He's a smart guy, but after a while he was saying stuff that was more about something purely theoretical and irrelevant.