Another dwt-win / dmd / dsss build problem

[Bill Baxter]

DBloke wrote:
> 
>> In France OCaml is in industry use, Airbus/ESA. France Telecom. Means 
>> OMake is still alive. Hope I got the chance to introduce D in 
>> Toulouse/Airbus this summer.
>>
>>>
>>> --bb
> 
> OCaml is an excellent language as is F# and Haskell These languages are 
> used by companies like Microsoft to build compilers :) Functional 
> languages are not new Lisp has been around for years, but they are just 
> starting to find their way into OO languages now, even D borrows from 
> the functional paradigm with lazy evaluation, lazy I call it common 
> sense ;) OMake is useful and could easily be utilised for D!
> 
> I am trying to educate the engineering bods in our work place about 
> alternatives to Java and C++ mainly D and OCaml, sadly the arguments I 
> get are related to lack of a decent IDE and Thin client support.
> 
> I will continue to chip away and you never know :)

OCaml is certainly not bad.  I actually had decided to make it my 
primary compiled language about a year or so ago after getting fed up 
with C++.  But the switch was just too difficult for an old time C++ 
user.  It wasn't obvious how I should do anything.  And I think the 
places where functional code shines are pretty much exactly the places 
where I don't go very often.  OCaml's support for fast numerics was what 
attracted me initially, plus I knew some ML from school, but in the end 
I just found it too painful to switch.  For instance it's not so easy to 
translate C/C++ code I have written or which I find on the web to OCaml.

D on the other hand makes for a very smooth transition.   And in a 
pretty short time I was able to use it, know exactly what was going on, 
and was able to easily to port C/C++/Java/C# code where nothing native 
exists in D etc.  (Or call directly into C libs if they're too big to port).

I think the main problem with functional languages is that they're just 
so darned functional, and procedural additions like monads seem 
heavy-handed and cumbersome.  Adding a dose of functional features to a 
procedural language, however, works pretty well and lets you only use 
the functional stuff where you really need it.

Anyway, I wish OCaml luck, but it really is fighting an uphill battle.

--bb