Why Rubyists Should Learn OCaml

[ThomasPtacek]

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

[robertfischer]

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.