OCaml for the Masses (2011)

I for one can't wait for Typed FP to become mainstream as soon as possible. I think the prevalence of scripting languages in large systems today is a quirk of history. In early 2000s, as the web was growing to be an application delivery platform, the only practical statically typed language was Java. It didn't have generics or lambdas at the time, and was infested with the sprawl of J2EE. Choosing Ruby/Python over Java was at the time an act…

I recently picked up a project in OCaml that I had begun last summer and never finished. I have to say, compared to my day-to-day tools (mostly Java these days, Python before), OCaml is a breath of fresh air. For instance, today I did a refactoring where I replaced a type that was simply an alias to string with a proper abstract data type. Fixing the code was simply a matter of compiling, going to the file/line number in the…

"Yet functional languages never really made it to the mainstream" JavaScript development these days is getting pretty darn close to what I would consider 'mainstream' functional programming. Heavy use of both first class and lambda functions, and closures have been standard practices for years now. And thanks to libraries like Underscore.js partial application and the use higher order functions like map/filter/etc are also becoming very common place. I'll absolutely agree that what we see is not 'pure' functional…

This was posted a few days ago: HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3047741 Reddit discussion: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/kuhn3/ocaml_for...