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

They're not equal though...

[Anonymous Coward]

The importance of concision is clear: other things being equal, shorter code is easier to read, easier to write, and easier to maintain.

All other things are not equal though, are they? Procedural programming is easier for humans to understand: most of us do no not think in a way that maps easily to functional programming.

Re:Another functional programming fan

[dkleinsc]

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).