Re: When functional languages can be accepted by industry?

From: T. Kurt Bond (tkb@tkb.mpl.com)
Date: Thu Apr 13 2000 - 16:29:51 MET DST

  • Next message: Pierre Weis: "Re: When functional languages can be accepted by industry?"

    Note that what I am about to say is *not* intended as a criticism of
    OCaml; I use OCaml every day, and enjoy using it.

    Jean-Christophe Filliatre writes:
    > > 1. Current functional languages do not have enough library support:
    >
    > Please. ocaml has the most wonderful standard library that any other
    > language has ever had. Have a look in the reference manual before
    > stating such non-sense.

    As much as I enjoy using OCaml, I think that this may be overstating
    the case. OCaml has a very good standard library that is very well
    documented; however, it does not have everything. Just a few examples
    of things that are missing from the standard library:

    * Parsing and manipulating RFC 822 mail headers
    * Parsing and manipulating MIME documents
    * Parsing and downloading URLs
    * A FTP client
    * An HTTP Server
    * An HTTP Client
    * An IMAP Client
    * An SMTP Client
    * A POP Client
    * A NNTP Client
    * A Telnet Client
    * Parsing, manipulating, and generating HTML
    * Parsing, manipulating, and generating SGML
    * Audio data creation and manipulation
    * Image data creation and manipulation
    * High-level file operations (copy file, copy directory tree,
      delete directory tree)

    Now, one could justifiably argue that such things don't belong in the
    standard library, but current a lot of programmers expect things like
    this to be in the standard library; this list, for instance, was
    generated by quickly scanning the Python documentation, and the Perl
    and Java libraries include similar functionality.

    It is true that many of these things can be obtained by downloading
    contributed packages for OCaml, but that's an extra step that
    programmers accustomed to other languages may not bother with when
    evaluating OCaml. They want a quick solution to their specific
    problems, and if they don't have to program large chunks of that
    solution because some other language includes that functionality in
    their standard library, they'll happily use *that* language.

    I personally will happily continue to use OCaml for very practical
    reasons, and I will continue to recommend to other programmers, but I
    will not fool myself into thinking it is perfect and that no-one will
    need things that it doesn't currently provide out-of-the-box.

    [As a side note, I must commend the OCaml team on their documentation
    of the language and standard libraries; every time I have to referee
    to the documentation I am impressed again by how succinctly yet
    clearly the documentation is written, and by how well organized it
    is.]

    -- 
    T. Kurt Bond, tkb@tkb.mpl.com
    



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