[Gllug] Perl Question - Spam Filter for NMS Form Mail

[Richard Jones]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 01:57:50PM -0000, James Laver wrote:
> I bought 'Practical Ocaml' last year and it truly is the most awful
> programming book I've had the misfortune to read.

Yes, I have to apologise about that giant mess.  Read more about it
here:

  http://blog.merjis.com/2006/11/08/practical-ocaml/

There's a couple of new books coming out soon, one of which you can
download now:

  http://files.metaprl.org/doc/ocaml-book.pdf

> As far as I can tell from this, Ocaml is a really bastardised ML dialect
> with caution thrown to the wind as far as immutability is concerned.
> 
> Things I'm hating so far:
> 
> - Syntax. It really makes me want to gouge out my eyes with plastic
> spoons. What's with the single-quote in polymorphic types? What's with the
> double-semicolon? etc.

Yup, everyone loves to hate the syntax.  To be fair - you don't have
to use the ;; except in the toplevel.  You can just omit it in
compiled code.  And the syntax is very efficient.  Code written in
OCaml is extremely short.

> - Library. Haskell has a really wonderful set of higher order functions in
> the prelude. I liked a couple of the ones I saw in ocaml, kprintf() I
> think was one but yet again it still wasn't entirely clear how to use it
> from the awful explanation.

You might like preludeml, which is Haskell's prelude in OCaml:

  http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/hump.cgi?contrib=684

Or "Batteries Included":

  http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/
  https://forge.ocamlcore.org/docman/view.php/77/36/batteries-included.pdf

> There are positive things I've noticed, but honestly these just make me
> want to run screaming.

I'm more interested that people are using compile-time safe languages,
and generally improving the quality of code.  There have been huge
advances in programming safety over the last 35 years, yet very very
few of them have filtered down to ordinary programmers.  That's a
great shame, because most of us have to put up with programs that
fail, crash, delete data, etc.  It's completely unnecessary.  As long
as you're using an advanced programming language like Haskell, you are
way beyond the average.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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