best OCaml tutorial

Discovered the best Ocaml tutorial
http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/html/index.html

Developing Applications With Objective Caml.
By Emmanuel CHAILLOUX - Pascal MANOURY - Bruno PAGANO

Xah's Ocaml Tutorial

My own ocaml tutorial: OCaml Basics.

Draft, but fairly good start.

ML family lineage

is there a brief summary of the ML family lineage? i'm esp interested in the syntax changes.

that is, ML, SML, Caml, Caml light, Ocaml, F#.

some sites showing page length source code of each would be sufficient. (i should be able to find this)

... basically, there are so many variations... and i've read Wikipedia on each. But it's still confusing why each variation is created or what context, or to what degree is the variation compatible or complete new lang, and whether it's just a single guy's thesis work or actually has some user base.

in practice, i think caml, caml light, all subsumed into just Ocaml or F#. Ocaml & F# are largely compatible, with F# mainly geared for Microsoft's “.NET”. While ML is today mostly just SML? is SML still much used? What's the diff between ML and SML?

in Wikipedia Standard ML at the bottom you see a bunch of variants. That's really tasking ... some of them are apparantly some single person's research project who's home page has not been updated for some decade... some of them are simply implementations of sml, while other variants seems to be addition of modules only ...

Thanks.

For some answers, see:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.functional/browse_frm/thread/b74918ffa59ae158

languages, purity, cult, and deception

perm url: http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/lang_purity_cult_deception.html

Xah Lee, 2009-01-24

[this essay is roughly a 10 years personal retrospect of some languages, in particular Scheme and Haskell.]

I learned far more Ocaml in the past 2 days than the fucking 2 months i tried to learn Haskell, with 10 years of “I WANT TO BELIEVE” in haskell.

The Haskell's problem is similar to Scheme lisp, being academic and of little industrial involvement. About 10 years ago, during the dot com era around 1999, where scripting war is going on (Perl, tcl, Applescript, Userland Frontier, with in the corner Python, Ruby, Icon, Scheme, in the air of Java, HTML 3, CSS, CGI, javascript), i was sold a lie by Scheme lisp. Scheme, has a aura of elegance and minimalism that's one hundred miles in radius. I have always been a advocate of functional programing, with a heart for formal methods. Scheme, being a academic lang, has such a association. At the time, Open Source and Linux have just arrived on the scene and screaming the rounds in the industry, along with Apache & Perl. The Larry Wall scumbag and Eric Raymond motherfucker and Linus T moron and Richard Stallman often appears in interviews in mainstream media. Richard Stallman's FSF with its GNU, is quick to make sure he's not forgotten, by a campaign on naming of Linux to GNU/Linux. FSF announced that Scheme is its chosen scripting lang for GNU system. Plans and visions of Guile — the new Scheme implementation, is that due to Scheme Lisp's power will have lang conversion abilities on the fly so programers can code in other lang if they wanted to, anywhere in the GNU platform. Around that time, i also wholeheartedly subscribed to some A Brave Gnu World bulletin of FSF with high expectations.

Now, it's 2009. Ten years have passed. Guile disappeared into oblivion. Scheme is tail recursing in some unknown desert. PHP, one of the ugly kludge pidgin, practically and quietly surpassed the motherfucking foghorn'd Perl in early 2000s to become the top 5 languages. (remember? Larry Wall scumbag said P is for “Practical”. PHP's got two “P”s.) Python has surfaced to became a mainstream. Ruby is the hip kid on the block. Where is Scheme? O, you can still hear these idiots fluttering tail recursions among themselves in newsgroups. Tail recursion! Tail recursion! And their standard the R6RS in 2007, by their own consensus, is one fucked up shit.

In 2000, i was a fair expert of unix technologies. Sys admin to several data center's solaris boxes each costing some 40 grands. Master of Mathematica and Perl but don't know much about any other lang or lang in general. Today, i am a expert of about 5 languages and working knowledge with tens or so diverse ones. There is nothing in Scheme i'd consider elegant, not remotely, even if we only consider R4RS.

Scheme, like other langs with a cult, sold me lie that lasted 10 years. Similarly, Haskell fucked me with a tag of “no assignment” lure. You can try to learn the lang for years and all you'll learn is that there's something called currying and monad. I regret i learned python too in 2006. Perl is known for its intentional egregious lies, lead by the demagogue Larry Wall (disclaimer: opinion only). It fell apart unable to sustain its “post-modernistic” sophistry. Python always seemed reasonable to me, until you walked in. You learned that the community is also culty, and is into certain grand visions on beauty & elegance with its increasingly complex syntax soup with backward incompatible python 3.0. The python fuckheads sport the air of “computer science R us”, in reality they are idiots about the same level of Perl mongers. (Schemers and Haskell people at least know what they are talking about. They just don't have the know how of the industry.)

I think my story can teach tech geekers something. In my experience, the langs that are truely a joy to learn and use, are those sans a cult. Mathematica, javascript, PHP, are all extremely a joy to use. Anything you want to do or learn how to do, in so far that the lang is suitable, can be done quickly. Their docs are to the point. And today i have to include Ocaml. It's not about whether the lang is functional, or whether the lang is elegant, or what theoretical power it has. Also, lang of strong academic background such as Scheme and Haskell are likely to stay forever there, regardless what is the technical nature of the lang. The background of the community, makes half what the language is.

The above is not a terrible insight, but i suppose it should be useful for some application. Today, there's huge number of languages, each screaming ME! To name a few that are bubbled up by tech geekers: Arc, Clojure, Scalar, F#, Erlang, Ruby, Groovy, Python 3, Perl6. (for a big list, see: Proliferation of Computing Languages) So, if i want to learn another lang down the road, and wish it to be a joy to use, usable docs, large number of usable libraries, well supported, a community that doesn't loop into the estheticalities of tail recursion or monad every minute, then which one should i buy? With industrial background in mind, not culty, lang beauty matter not that much, i think Erlang, F# would be safe choices, while langs like Qi, Oz, Arc, Perl6, would be most questionable.

Disclaimer: All mentions of real persons are opinion only.

Best Ocaml tutorial

Just a quick relpy.

Jon's tutorial:
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/chapter1.html

is by far the best tutorial of Ocaml.

It is far better than the official intro to ocaml at
“caml.inria.fr” or the popularly cited tutorial at
“ocaml-tutorial.org” .

Jon's tutorial, namely the free chapter 1 of his book, is concise, to the point, well written, well organized, does not unnecessarily use abstruse jargons or concepts, does not pitch or preach engineering practices or paradigms.

Jon's book title says it all: Ocaml for Scientist.
Scientists are intelligent. All programing language tutorials should be modeled like this. For some detail, see:

• Examples Of Quality Documentation In The Computing Industry
http://xahlee.org/perl-python/quality_docs.html

Btw, i've learned far more Ocaml in the past 3 days than the about 1 month of full time trying to learn Haskell. Mostly in 2006 or 2007. I did not even obtain a basic understanding of the syntax. I do not have a basic understanding of its types or how to define a type (was quite confused in this). I don't even have a good idea what the lang's syntactical elements or structural elements or semantic elements. In fact, i have no basic understanding of the language. I tried. I tried about 4 online tutorials or downloadable paper-published books. They are extremely low quality and or idiotic. Half of the time is wasted on finding a good tutorial or reading unreadable ones, and time is spent on huge garbage texts about reading why haskell is better or currying this or monads that (they idiots lacking mathematician's perspicacity don't really understand the subject). Motherfucking idiots. (i even tried to start a mailing list and drew a web-badge for haskell by my enthusiasm. See: A Haskell A Day http://xahlee.org/haskell/haskell.html (it went no where and is now on hold indefinitely))

I really believed in Haskell, almost just by its “we don't allow assignments and we have ‘lazy evaluation’”. I believed it for 10 years. No more.

Jon wrote:
> And the freely-available first chapter of The OCaml Journal:
>
> http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_journal/free/introduction...
>
> I also recommend Jason Hickey's book which, I believe, is due to be
> published by Cambridge University Press soon:
>
> http://www.cs.caltech.edu/courses/cs134/cs134b/book.pdf

Thanks. Am still reading your chapter 1 yet. Will check those out later.

Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

--------

PS: Jon's tutorial has some errors, and Jon is really a asshole, perpetually insert his book advertisement into comp.lang.lisp and other groups. For detail, see:

• Function Application is not Currying
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/apply_func_examples.html

3 ocaml tutorials on the web

ok, i've been reading these Ocaml tutorials in the past few days:

intro to ocaml, from official site
http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/manual003.html

“Objective CAML Tutorial”, most cited tutorial on the web
http://www.ocaml-tutorial.org/

None of them are perfect, but much better than haskell ones.
The official tutorial is ok, but still confusing.

The one at ocaml-tutorial.org is somewhat better because it's got a lot more explanatory text. It has much verbiage for imperative programers (i.e. half of the text is about Perl this, C that, Java thus, trying to each you functional lang by comparative study assuming you are one of these these idiots. Often, the comparison are forced thus doesn't necessarily make sense)

The best one, is the one is
“Introduction to Caml”
http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~scott/pl/lectures/caml-intro.html
by Dr Scott Smith of Johns Hopkins U, apparently a lecture note.
I found it by as one of the top result from google search.

This one is to the point, on lang syntax, what they do and mean, to the point short examples, focusing one concept at a time. (as opposed to the typical of: littering of motherfucking abstruse jargons thru-out, littering gospels about properties of starry-eyed fucking advantage of static mother fucking typing, the beauties of functional programing fuck, no concrete examples but full of high-horse abstract terminologies that are factually from asses who doesn't know a flying fuck about symbolic logic, replete with computer engineering fuck typical of compiler geekers like garbage collection, garbage collection, garbage collection!!!, memory address memory address memory, pointers pointers pointers!!! hips and stacks and hips and stacks and very hip!)

though, it is of course not perfect by my ideal, because it still now and then mention extraneous stupid computer engineering concepts like “GARBAGE COLLECTION”, “stateful”, how something is “expression-based”, etc. If you are have a typical computer science background, sure these are no problem. But if you are a say practical programer who never took computer science classes, you'll go Huh? and if you are say the world's top mathematician but never studied programing, you'll go HUH?

But again, this tutorial is far far better than vast majority of tutorials out there about functional programing (except mine).

The haskell tutorials you can find online are the most motherfucking stupid unreadable fuck. The Haskell community is almost stupid. What they talk all day is about monads, currying, linder myer fuck type. That's what they talk about all day. All day and night. Monad! What's a monad?! The Zen of monad! The philosophical importance of monad! The applicability and practicality of monad thru a thought experiment! Fucking morons, but MONAD!

Ocaml, comp lang syntax, and proof systems

recently, as you might have noted by a previous post of mine, that American Mathematical Society published a series of articles on formal proofs in 2008 November. See: http://www.ams.org/notices/200811/ The articles are:

• Formal Proof by Thomas Hales
• Formal Proof — The Four-Color Theorem by Georges Gonthier
• Formal Proof — Theory and Practice by John Harrison
• Formal Proof — Getting Started by Freek Wiedijk

I read 3 of them in December (only scanned the four-color theorem one).

It was quite a fantastically enjoyable reading.

(
For some personal notes, see: Current State Of Theorem Proving Systems at the bottom of
• The Codification of Mathematics
http://xahlee.org/cmaci/notation/math_codify.html
)

As you may know, codification of math has been a long personal interest. In fact, my logical analytic habit has made me unable to read most math texts, which are full of logical errors and relies on a “human” interpretation for its soundness and clarity.

having read those intro articles from the AMS publication on current state of the art, i decided that i'm going to learn HOL Light. (tried to learn Coq before and the tutorial is problematic)

One of the interesting finding was that almost all theorem proving systems are written in ML family lang, e.g. Caml, Ocaml. Of course, i heard of Ocaml since about 1998 when i was doing Scheme. Somehow it never impressed me from reading the functional programing FAQ. I have always been attracted more to Haskell, perhaps only because it is _pure_ in the sense of not allowing assignment. With that, ocaml has been “just another functional lang” in my mind. But now, seeing that most theorem proving systems used in the real world are in Caml, thus i made start to learn Ocaml now. (in fact, its root is a theorem prover)

i wanted to add proofs as enhancement to my A Visual Dictionary Of Special Plane Curves. Also, had ambition to write more... about algebraic geometry and differential geometry and geometry with complex numbers. Proofs will be major part of these type of works. I can no longer tolerate traditional mouthy written-english proofs. They must be codified proofs.

In this:

HOL Light Tutorial (for version 2.20)
by John Harrison
September 9, 2006,

there's this paragraph:

“This fits naturally with the view, expressed for example by Dijkstra (1976), that a programming language should be thought of first and foremost as an algorithm-oriented system of mathematical notation, and only secondarily as something to be run on a machine.”

Wee! That has been my view since about 1997. The only lang that adhere to that view i know of is Mathematica.

(lisping morons don't understand a iota of it. See:

• Is Lisp's Objects Concept Necessary?
http://xahlee.org/emacs/lisps_objects.html

• The Concepts and Confusions of Prefix, Infix, Postfix and Fully Nested Notations
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/notations.html
)

btw, anyone know the source of that Dijkstra quote?

Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄