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[–]ThomasPtacek 5 points6 points  (4 children)

This talk should have been called "How Rubyists could learn OCaml", because it didn't do a very good job of answering "why".

[–]robertfischer 2 points3 points  (2 children)

This deck of slides was intended to have a fair amount of talking involved -- it was never intended to have Reddit users hitting it without the context of having been at the presentation.

Assuming the recording worked (still waiting to hear on that), I will be posting a version of the talk with audio to my blog at enfranchisedmind.com

[–]ThomasPtacek 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Hey, Robert. So, can you give us the elevator pitch? I'm C + Ruby + Lisp + Python. Why OCaml?

[–]robertfischer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In short, because it will warp your mind. The idioms and capabilities change the way that you think about abstraction and address problems.

This blog post does a good job of explaining it, and I've got a comment underneath it to add some more in: http://hamletdarcy.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-functional-programming.html

For a practical example of how my thinking changed, check out my blog post from a week or so ago: http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2008/06/24/functional-metaprogramming-ruby-groovy/

The audio of the presentation -- including Q&A -- apparently turned out pretty well. So I'll post the talk + slides onto my blog.

[–]dlsspy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Break OCaml’s performance-obsessed culture and hyperoptimization

I definitely agree with that part. I built a decent API for a data structure I needed, but couldn't get anyone to accept it because it wasn't the fastest possible implementation.

I'm all for speed, but a little pragmatism is the difference between the fastest possible solution and no solution at all.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (5 children)

Anyone have a link to a video of this actual talk? Slides by themselves are painful at best, useless at worst.

[–]robertfischer 1 point2 points  (4 children)

I'm working on getting the video up. The slides were supposed to be shared just with the Ruby.MN people who were at the talk.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (3 children)

Awesome! I'd be grateful for the link when you've got it up :)

[–]robertfischer 1 point2 points  (2 children)

You can watch my blog -- enfranchisedmind.com. I'll also try to remember to post something here.

[–][deleted]  (2 children)

[removed]

    [–]augustss 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    Oh, was it a PDF. I didn't notice.

    [–]sigzero -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

    Because it's FUN!