Another day of procrastination, avoiding those very important things that I have lined up. I have put off both short term and long term goals today. For example, that to-do list for the Canadian Visa. Sunday – definitely short term.
One other thing I have been thinking about for a while now. Learning Ocaml. It’s a programming language. It’s a programming language very different from the others that I currently know. That is a fact. What keeps this item on the list though, is speculation that Ocaml would be a very powerful development for my programming if I get around to learning it. You see, it is a language which is advertised as being very “expressive”. What that means is that, for a given program, Ocaml purports to allow the programmer to be much more succint in his code. What greater virtue is there in coding, after all, than the compact expression of abstract ideas? Well, the quality of expressiveness promises that, and that promise is one I believe.
Other than Ocaml, another expressive language is Common Lisp. Out of all the high level, expressive, functional (well, CL isn’t exactly functional, but whatever) languages, Ocaml produces the fastest binaries, and that’s why I plan to learn it first.
Plan to. ;)
Check out the first chapter of my book OCaml for Scientists.
I actually got the MIT library to buy “Ocaml for Scientists” months ago! Maybe it’s time for me to try reading it again. I have been coding a decent amount in Common Lisp, and the constructs in Ocaml seem a lot less alien now.