OT: interesting talk by Jane Street technical guy on why they used Ocaml

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d-learn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKcOkWzj0_s

a little old but still relevant.  talks about importance of 
brevity and strong types for readability (also avoiding 
boilerplate).  two of the partners there committed to read every 
line of code (originally because they were terrified).  very hard 
to code review boilerplate carefully because it is just too dull! 
  (can't pay people enough!)

correctness is v important if you are doing high volumes.  but 
being able to iterate rapidly is important in other areas too.

value of predictable performance in generated code.

much easier to hire great programmers in ocaml.
way they switched wasn't a big strategic plan.  guy just turned 
up at a windows shop (spreadsheets with VB backends etc) in a 
temp job between university courses.  ended up being permanent 
thing.  started hiring people to help him with analysis.  became 
clearer they needed a better solution - nightmare from 
copying/paste with spreadsheets.  sent email to ocaml list and 15 
responses of which 12 great and 3 he hired - great ratio.  maybe 
do an experiment.  wrote first version of system in 3 months, 
worked well and slowly expanded from there.

part of attraction of ocaml was ability to hire.  later if they 
need more people they can teach them.  they don't hire bad 
programmers, and it's easy to teach good ones.

F# does not perform well.  needs to allocate!  F# developers 
dismissive 'you must have bug in your program'.  F# has null 
problem - becomes problem when calling .net libraries.  windows 
not great for high performance (timestamps weird).