OCaml For the Masses 338
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.'"
Re:Give me a call when... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Give me a call when... (Score:2, Informative)
You mean like right now? Haskell's pretty mature, and it's been able to compile to native code for years. It's pretty straight forward to talk to C (the universal ABI) with Haskell (well, as straight forward as anything is in Haskell).
OCaml has been mature for nearly a decade, by the way. Without the success it's had, languages such as Haskell and F# wouldn't be around. It also can compile to native code, and has been able to since inception.
PS, the .NET VM isn't really decrepit, it's much more performant than the JVM is. Sadly, mono isn't nearly as mature as the actual .NET virtual machine.
Re:Two line summary of TFA (Score:2, Informative)
I have the perfect hammer.
Would that be the C family of languages used all over the place?
Re:haskell for the masses? sure, but only... (Score:0, Informative)
haskell for "the masses" is possible as soon as "the masses" has a degree in mathematics. java and php are copy-and-paste languages, functional languages simply take more thinking to compile at all, and i think many programmers are not prepared to do that to the required degree, although i'd love to be proved wrong.
Functional languages are very easy to master, much much easier than Java or C++; and no you certainly don't need a degree in mathematics to understand and program in Scala or Haskell or Ocaml.
The problem is the mas of sunday day programmers out there that think that javascript or php are the end all to computer languages.