Oh Camel!

January 27th, 2006 · Comments

I’ve decided to take it upon myself to learn Objective Caml (OCaml) as my next hobbyist programming language, meeting one of my Goals for 2006. Why such an odd, rare language? I’ve already tinkered with most of the normal ones, for starts. I decided that I wanted to learn a language that does not resemble any of the ones I already know, so that I would expand my skill as a programmer as much as possible.

Conventional wisdom (or at least the Pragmatic Programmers) says that programmers need to learn at least one new programming every year to keep their skills in shape and their ideas fresh. Each programming language can be likened to a philosophical discourse: each one is a manifestation of the creator’s theories, practices, and ideas. Every language has it’s own idea of what the best technique is to get to a particular solution. As a programmer, it is in your best interest to be familiar with a wide variety of techniques, because nearly each one is applicable in every other language as well.

I figured that this time I should go off the deep end and learn a Functional Programming Language. I’m honestly not sure what the big deal behind Functional Programming is (John Hughes has an idea), as much of it’s advantages seem more academic than practical to the kind of work that I do. The only way to learn why it matters, is to try to take advantage of it.

Why OCaml? I had originally decided that it would be either OCaml or Haskell. I read the Haskell for C Programmers tutorial, and my brain bled. It seemed to be too far over my head for my own hobbyist self-discipline to pursue. My friend Michel recommended I take a look at Scala, but the syntax felt too much like Java to me. Because OCaml also allows you to use imperative programming techniques, it seemed like a good way to dip my toes into this new foreign ocean. I am likewise happy and horrified that OCaml allows you to use Perl modules from CPAN using Perl4Caml.

So what does this mean for me? Well, it doesn’t mean that I am abandoning Ruby. In fact, I updated a few scripts on my software page yesterday. Things have began settling down around the house so that I can start taking a stab at releasing Geotoad 3.9 and 4.0, and make geocaching fun again. On top of all of those, I will most likely be working on revisiting Python this year. I haven’t given it much of a look since I learned Ruby 5 years ago.

Anyone have any good books or resources they recommend for learning Ocaml or ML?

Tags: technology

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009 02/28/2006 01:06 PM 1 point
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I think you can learn scheme language,a functional programming language and the queen of programming languages .
Scheme is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the Lisp programming language. It was designed to have an exceptionally clear and simple semantics and few different ways to form expressions. A wide variety of programming paradigms including imperative,functional,and message passing styles,find convenivent expression in Scheme.I am learning it.

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Mikey Cooper 02/02/2006 07:06 PM 1 point
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I vote for you checking out Nemerle next. I didn't see much need for it over C#, but maybe you could explain it to me.

C# 3.0's type inference, from what I can tell, is strictly compile-time inference and doesn't do much other than save you a word of two of typing when declaring variables.

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http://www.bluey.com

Michel 01/28/2006 06:43 PM 1 point
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Because Forth's best-known customers (Apple) is moving away from it? :)

The OCaml guy in my programming language class informed me that it lets you reuse C functions quite easily as well (better than JNI, certainly, which even Java programmers are abandoning), so seems like you made a good choice there.

Microsoft's starting to buy into FP, which is quite encouraging.. it might finally take off (C# 3.0 will have anonymous functions and type inferencing; C-omega, the research language, also has this cool idea called streams. Both still do not optimize tail calls, alas).

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http://the-dubois-papers.blogspot.com

Joey 01/28/2006 12:22 PM 1 point
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What about FORTH man? ;)

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http://www.far2wise.net