Re: [Caml-list] Some Clarifications

[Ville-Pertti Keinonen <will@exomi.com>]

Robert Morelli wrote:

> To be entirely frank,  I am put off by the style of your comments.

My annoyance with regard to your (largely unsubstantiated) points was 
probably apparent in my style.

> If you disagree with my answer to the subject of this discussion,
> you should point the original poster to what you think is a
> discussion of large scale functional design,  or present your own
> explanation for why it doesn't exist.  I would be genuinely interested

What is large-scale OO design, then?

Most of the methodologies (abstraction, layering, tools such as UML) I'm 
aware of translate more-or-less directly to (stateful) FP in general, 
and OCaml in particular as it provides OO abstraction as well as functional.

> in what you have to say.  But instead,  you have chosen to veer off into
> rhetoric,  advocacy,  and ad hominem distractions.  I am puzzled by your

First of all, I apologize if my points appeared to be ad hominem 
attacks, they were not intended as such.  I'm still curious as to your 
amounts of relative experience in different languages and paradigms - 
that was a question, not an attack - and I may have veered too far into 
speculation about common reasons why people may draw the kinds of 
conclusions you seemed to be implying in your posts.  It was 
speculation, not assertion.

> citing points about Erlang and concurrent variants of ML that sound
> superficially to be relevant,  but which have no real bearing on
> anything I said.  I disagree with the frequent use of this mailing list

You were citing increased need for parallelism as a reason for FP to 
become less relevant in the future; I think that specific examples of 
combining concurrency and functional approaches are valid counterexamples.

Please be specific as to why they aren't relevant.

> to irrationally promote OCaml as a superior language to Java.  It is not

What criterion are used to evaluate superiority are of course extremely 
subjective.  Personally I consider expressiveness to be very important. 
  Do you disagree that OCaml is more expressive (i.e. there are more 
things that can be concisely expressed in OCaml but not in Java than 
vice versa)?

If there are things that you find are simple to do in Java (preferably 
as a language rather than through its library collection) but not in 
OCaml, I'd very much like specific examples.

It's entirely valid to disagree on the importance of expressiveness, or 
whether providing a variety of tools for abstraction vs. concentrating 
on a single paradigm is better.