[Discuss] Functional programming @ UVic (was 'C' string tokenizer for those who hate strtok)

[taras]

On Fri, 2006-06-30 at 18:48 -0700, Deryk Barker wrote:
> Adam Parkin wrote:
> 
> > David Bronaugh wrote:
> >
> >>> Does anyone in town work in OCaml?  I'd love to hear about some
> >>> real-life examples.  I love new languages, and OCaml looks interesting.
> >>>   
> >>
> >> Me, my friend Taras, a few other people at UVic play around with 
> >> OCaml and other ML-based languages.
> >>
> >
> > Yeah, Taras is something of a functional programming evangelist now. 
> > =8->  He was converted to the way of ML by my grad supervisor George 
> > Tzanetakis who is a big-time functional programming propaganda artist. 
> > =;-p

No actually George's class coincided with me delving in the wonderful
world of OCaml. I learned it in CSC340 and laughed when all of my ocaml
algorithms were 10-20x shorter than people's C/Java versions.

> 
> If you want a counter to the "functional programming is all very well 
> for academics, but no good for real world applications" argument, try 
> erlang.

Most academics these days are stuck on OO. Only the smart ones are into
functional programming :) That's why they don't teach functional
programming in first year in crappier universities.

Erlang is a pretty awesome language in that it's the only platform that
makes it easy to write programs that scale on multicore systems or run
distributed over the network. On the other hand it's not as elegant or
fast as OCaml.

OCaml is a powerful language that allows to writing concise, fast
programs. It's especially well suited for symbolic processing like
compilers and more recently fast xml processing. It allows working with
complex data structures that make programmers want to hang themselves if
they are to be written in C.

For examples of software in ocaml see the Hump
http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/hump.cgi


Taras