Yaron Minsky
Index Terms
- OCaml for the masses
Recommendations
OCaml + XDuce
ICFP '06: Proceedings of the eleventh ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programmingThis paper presents the core type system and type inference algorithm of OCamlDuce, a merger between OCaml and XDuce. The challenge was to combine two type checkers of very different natures while preserving the best properties of both (principality and ...
OCaml + XDuce
Proceedings of the 2006 ICFP conferenceThis paper presents the core type system and type inference algorithm of OCamlDuce, a merger between OCaml and XDuce. The challenge was to combine two type checkers of very different natures while preserving the best properties of both (principality and ...
3D Tomosynthesis Evaluation of Pixel Intensity Values of Breast Masses
Bioengineering and Biomedical Signal and Image ProcessingAbstractBreast cancer remains the most commonly diagnosed cancer among women in India and globally. For women 30 years old and older, current evidence supports evaluation with diagnostic mammography combined with targeted breast ultrasound for palpable or ...
Reviews
Sara Kalvala
One of the often-cited success stories in the use of functional programming in recent years has been the deployment of OCaml by Jane Street, a trading company dealing in high volumes of shares and funds. Financial trading requires software of high integrity, speed, and trustworthiness; any bug in the software can cost vast sums of money. In this lively and readable paper, Minsky explains, at a high level, the reasons why OCaml fits with the software requirements for Jane Street's trading functions and the outcomes of its experience. Most of the paper is characterized by an informal, example-based description of the features of functional languages in general, and OCaml in particular, that make it particularly suitable for Jane Street's purposes, mainly pertaining to the type of system. Some of the features are compared with analogues in Java and C#, and bring home the point that the type of system, based on algebraic data types and type inference, offers many benefits for software readability and correctness. The paper starts by describing the previous use of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code and Excel spreadsheets to run the necessary functions, which raises the expectation that the author will compare the coding of the financial calculations in OCaml vis-?-vis VBA and Excel. However, no such comparison is made, nor does the author address the issue of mathematical calculations, which are notoriously challenging. Mutability is one of the points of contention between different functional programming theorists; the issue is described briefly, but the actual use of mutable state in Jane Street's programs is not explained. The short, well-written paper is particularly suitable for introducing colleagues and students to the idea of functional programming. The paper's strength is that it provides an enthusiastic and well-informed endorsement for functional languages from the point of view of an organization where decisions on software development are not academic, but involve serious financial repercussions. OCaml and functional languages suffer from a slightly dismissive attitude from industry-based software developers; one can hope that papers like this one, read with an open mind, may encourage more people to consider using this class of programming languages. Online Computing Reviews Service
Access critical reviews of Computing literature here
Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.
Comments