OCaml for the Masses

BRANK

The September/October issue of acmqueue is out nowSubscribers and ACM Professional members login hereSeptember 27, 2011Volume 9, issue 9Yaron Minsky, Jane StreetSometimes, the elegant implementation is a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function. - John CarmackFunctional programming is an old idea with a distinguished history. Lisp, a functional language inspired by Alonzo Church's lambda calculus, was one of the first programming languages developed at the dawn of the computing age. Statically typed functional languages such as OCaml and Haskell are newer, but their roots go deep—ML, from which they descend, dates back to work by Robin Milner in the early '70s relating to the pioneering LCF (Logic for Computable Functions) theorem prover.Functional programming has also been enormously influential. Many fundamental advances in programming language design, from garbage collection to generics to type inference, came out of the functional world and were commo…