Googling after "Richard Ford" Florida Institute gives the following information:
Richard Ford the "Linux fan" is an author of an online article from 2003, where he argues that OS moncultures do not increase securtity risks.
In a 2004 Conference on computer viruses, he has given a talk together with an employee of Microsoft.
I would seriously doubt that he was biased against Microsoft;)
This was my opinion at first.
My first OCaml program (a simple fractal computation algorithm) was about 20 lines long and it took me a whole afternoon and it was no fun at all.
After I got used to that syntax I learned to like it, and now I really prefer to almost any other languagues (expect for Ruby).
I always prefered it over LISP, since the lot of parenthesis makes it too uniform and therfore hard to read.
I use Ruby for scripting exclusively, but my experience is that dynamically typed programming languages are not suited for larger projects, since they tend to have a lot of runtime errors, and very sensible to changes in compiler version.
The file synchronisation tool unison shows that OCaml is exteremely well suited for complex file-manipulation algorithms.
The performance difference between C and OCaml depends heavily on the application. I have written a relatively small application in OCaml (an interpreter for the programming language Joy) and the optimized OCaml version was faster than its C counterpart. (The C version, not programmed by myself, is about 6x larger and still slower)
There are examples where OCaml is significantly slower, but I think, that you would rarely see a 2X slowdown when programming carefully.
On the other hand the development time can be significantly reduced: programming in OCaml is normally about 2-5 times faster than in C++ if one takes the reduced time for debugging into account. And this is true for ma altough I have more than 8 years (and over 100 KLOC) C++ experience while less than one year OCaml experience.
One can also add that the object system of OCaml is much more powerful than that of C++. It allows for much more genericness while having a thourough type-safety. You can not achieve the same genericness in C++, since you can add everywhere explicit type delaration (resulting in long and complicated template names) where OCaml can deduce the type information automatically. This makes code-refactorization much more easy.
It is not true that OCaml needs a different type of thinking than a procedural or object-oriented language. OCaml has full support for "traditional" programming style and in fact most OCaml programs are written that way. Haskell and Clean are more elegant, but they really require that the programmer uses a purely functional programming style without mutable states.
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Memoization and lazyness are basically different concepts.
Typically, you do not have to pay tuition in German universities.
Googling after "Richard Ford" Florida Institute gives the following information: Richard Ford the "Linux fan" is an author of an online article from 2003, where he argues that OS moncultures do not increase securtity risks. In a 2004 Conference on computer viruses, he has given a talk together with an employee of Microsoft. I would seriously doubt that he was biased against Microsoft ;)
This was my opinion at first. My first OCaml program (a simple fractal computation algorithm) was about 20 lines long and it took me a whole afternoon and it was no fun at all. After I got used to that syntax I learned to like it, and now I really prefer to almost any other languagues (expect for Ruby). I always prefered it over LISP, since the lot of parenthesis makes it too uniform and therfore hard to read.
I am a big fan of Ruby either.
I use Ruby for scripting exclusively, but my experience is that dynamically typed programming languages are not suited for larger projects, since they tend to have a lot of runtime errors, and very sensible to changes in compiler version.
The file synchronisation tool unison shows that OCaml is exteremely well suited for complex file-manipulation algorithms.
The performance difference between C and OCaml depends heavily on the application. I have written a relatively small application in OCaml (an interpreter for the programming language Joy) and the optimized OCaml version was faster than its C counterpart. (The C version, not programmed by myself, is about 6x larger and still slower) There are examples where OCaml is significantly slower, but I think, that you would rarely see a 2X slowdown when programming carefully. On the other hand the development time can be significantly reduced: programming in OCaml is normally about 2-5 times faster than in C++ if one takes the reduced time for debugging into account. And this is true for ma altough I have more than 8 years (and over 100 KLOC) C++ experience while less than one year OCaml experience. One can also add that the object system of OCaml is much more powerful than that of C++. It allows for much more genericness while having a thourough type-safety. You can not achieve the same genericness in C++, since you can add everywhere explicit type delaration (resulting in long and complicated template names) where OCaml can deduce the type information automatically. This makes code-refactorization much more easy. It is not true that OCaml needs a different type of thinking than a procedural or object-oriented language. OCaml has full support for "traditional" programming style and in fact most OCaml programs are written that way. Haskell and Clean are more elegant, but they really require that the programmer uses a purely functional programming style without mutable states.