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

[Mengu via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Saturday, 3 October 2015 at 16:33:38 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> On Saturday, 3 October 2015 at 15:58:38 UTC, Mengu wrote:
>> On Saturday, 3 October 2015 at 01:41:55 UTC, Laeeth Isharc 
>> wrote:
>>> 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!)
>>>
>>> [...]
>>
>> there's also andy smith's talk [0] at dconf 2015 on adapting 
>> D, titled "hedge fund development case study."
>>
>> [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KBhb0iWsWQ
>
> Thanks!  Funnily enough I rewatched the Jane Street talk 
> because of a suggestion made by John Colvin when I was talking 
> to Andy and him recently.  It's a good talk by Andy, and I hope 
> to build on this with him at Codemesh next month.
>
> The way languages actually get adopted is different from how 
> people who are sitting in eg the kind of enterprise environment 
> where they are never going to be early adopters imagine.  Hence 
> one is much better off focusing efforts on those already 
> receptive (and who are looking for a solution to their pain) 
> than trying to convert those who are happy with what they have 
> or uninterested (possibly rationally so) in exploring new 
> things.
>
> Being able to understand the codebase is underrated I think.

i watched this talk by yaron last year when i was looking at 
alternatives for sml. i was taking the programming languages 
course on coursera by dan grossman. ocaml looked like it tooked 
off at the beginning of 2000s but then due to many problems it 
failed to be a mainstream language.

imho, D will never take off like go or rust because people who 
adopted these languages are mostly python and ruby developers. D 
has an incredibly creative and helpful community yet our 
community is not as enthusiastic as go's and rust's community. 
phobos is extremely a great library yet not very welcoming and 
feels overly complicated. we should reduce the amount of WTFs 
when reading the phobos source and docs.