“F Sharp”/OCaml Books and People

[Xah Lee]

“F Sharp”/OCaml Books and People

Xah Lee, 2010-09-20

This page is a short intro of F#/OCaml books and their authors as of
2010.

Discovered a new book on F#/OCaml.

《The F# Survival Guide》 By John Puopolo et al. At: ctocorner.com
A look at Amazon, there are quite a few books on F#/OCaml too.

《Expert F# 2.0 (Expert's Voice in F#)》 (2010) By Don Syme, Adam
Granicz, Antonio Cisternino. amazon
《Expert F# (Expert's Voice in .Net)》 (2007) By Don Syme, Adam Granicz,
Antonio Cisternino. amazon
Don Syme, one of the book author, has a website with lots of news on
F# at msdn.com Don Syme. Apparently, a lot is going on.

《Real World Functional Programming: With Examples in F# and C#》 (2009)
By Tomas Petricek, Jon Skeet. amazon

Thomas Petricek is a master student specializing in programing models,
and interned at Microsoft under Don Syme. His home page is tomasp.net
Thomas Petricek.

《Beginning F#》 (2009) By Robert Pickering. amazon
《Foundations of F# (Expert's Voice in .Net)》 (2007) By Robert
Pickering. amazon
Robert Pickering seems to have 10 years of coding experience according
to his resume. His blog is at: strangelights.com Robert Pickering.

《F# for Scientists》 (2008) By Jon Harrop. amazon
Jon Harrop is well known online. I read the first chapter of his book
in 2008, and it is one of the best online short intro to OCaml by far.

In online programing forums, he often taunts other languages. He's
known as a troll. (me too) He has a blog at fsharpnews.blogspot.com

《Programming F#: A comprehensive guide for writing simple code to
solve complex problems》 (2009) By Chris Smith. amazon
Chris Smith seems to have 8 years coding experience; At Microsoft. His
blog is at blogs.msdn.com Chris Smith

There are apparently more F# book coming:

《Professional F# 1.0》 By Ted Neward, Aaron Erickson, Talbott Crowell,
Rick Minerich. amazon
Interestingly, many of them are also available in Kindle Edition.
(See: What's Kindle, iPad, Android, and All That Jazz??.)

There's also 《Practical OCaml》 By Joshua B Smith, but on amazon it got
very bad reviews.

Note that F# (F Sharp) and OCaml are basically the same practically
speaking. F# is implemented on top of Microsoft's .NET, while OCaml is
mostly from the unix world.

The history of OCaml is rather confusing. Basically, it all began as
ML (programming language) in 1973. The “ML” stand for metalanguage.
Originally designed for theorem proving related tasks. Thru the years,
many variations came, including Standard ML, Caml, OCaml; Moscow ML,
Alice, F#. F# and OCaml being the current 2 most popular and mostly
compatible. Here's Wikipedia quote:

ML is a general-purpose functional programming language developed by
Robin Milner and others in the late 1970s at the University of
Edinburgh,[1] whose syntax is inspired by ISWIM. Historically, ML
stands for metalanguage: it was conceived to develop proof tactics in
the LCF theorem prover (whose language, pplambda, a combination of the
first-order predicate calculus and the simply typed polymorphic lambda-
calculus, had ML as its metalanguage). It is known for its use of the
Hindley–Milner type inference algorithm, which can automatically infer
the types of most expressions without requiring explicit type
annotations.

See also: Xah's OCaml/F# Tutorial.

-----------------------

For links and comments please go to:
http://xahlee.blogspot.com/2010/09/f-sharpocaml-books-and-people.html

Xah ∑ xahlee.org ☄

[namekuseijin]

I'm looking forward for OCaml/F# for Trolls. :)

kiddin' I do enjoy some of Harrop's ramblings...

[Xah Lee]

Post by namekuseijin
I'm looking forward for OCaml/F# for Trolls. :)
kiddin'  I do enjoy some of Harrop's ramblings...

i just finished watching a great interview.

〈ELC 2010: Rich Hickey and Joe Pamer - Perspectives on Clojure and F#〉
(2010-08-09) http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/charles/emerging-langs-clojure-and-f

It's 24 minutes. It's interview with Clojure inventor Rick Hickey, and
Microsoft's F# compiler writer Joe Pamer.

in past few years i've watched a number of highly intelligent people
on video talking about langs and tech. It's really great.

in this vid, it's far more interesting and attractive than Rich's
other vid i mentioned recently.

havn't seen Harrop here for a year or two. My random guess is that
newsgroup popularity is so dead that he doesn't consider the effort
here worthwhile anymore.

• 〈Death of Newsgroups〉
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ2/death_of_newsgroups.html

• 〈Programer Celebrities; Styles and Tack〉
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ2/programer_styles_and_tack.html

Xah ∑ xahlee.org ☄

[namekuseijin]

• 〈Death of Newsgroups〉http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ2/death_of_newsgroups.html

what's the matter? Lisp has been dead for longer than newsgroups, but
is still alive and kicking... (specially among old farts)...

[Xah Lee]

• 〈Death of Newsgroups〉http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ2/death_of_newsgroups.html

what's the matter?  Lisp has been dead for longer than newsgroups, but
is still alive and kicking... (specially among old farts)...

i think clojure is really putting life back in lisp, from several
hours of blog reading yesterday.

lisp had a come back in early 2000s, due to Paul Graham and Practical
Common Lisp,

• 〈Computer Language Popularity Trend〉
http://xahlee.org/lang_traf/index.html

but seems to have gone on a steady decline since. But i think clojure
is now a new wave of lisp come-back.

Xah

[Xah Lee]

Post by Xah Lee
lisp had a come back in early 2000s, due to Paul Graham and Practical
Common Lisp,
• 〈Computer Language Popularity Trend〉
http://xahlee.org/lang_traf/index.html
but seems to have gone on a steady decline since. But i think clojure
is now a new wave of lisp come-back.

That's why there are *so many more good libraries* than when I was
doing stuff actively in the early 2000s.  Yes, I can see that makes
complete sense: one must ignore things like that and focus on newsgroup
traffic, because that's a really reliable indicator.

you missed the point due to your Common Lisp sensitivity, no doubt.

the question is not about whether there are more libs for Common Lisp,
nor whether Common Lisp's popularity increased or decreased, or
whether Xah's newsgroup chart is good indication of lisp popularity.

the question was, whether lisp has become more popular in late years,
with respect to the whole computing industry. And, what useful info
you might have to indicate one way or another. More specifically, i
think so because largely due to Clojure, and recent thinking about the
multi-core problem and how functional langs is supposed to solve it.

my newsgroup chart was there just to provide one ref point for the
fact that lisp experienced a resurgence in early 2000s.

am often so frustrated by the tech geeking idiots. They never see the
important points, but fret over minute details.

the question of popularity of lisp is a interesting question. Even
though it is not a scientific question, but still a enjoyable hot
gossip topic, and certainly has reasonable answers, and is in fact a
important question for market research. If you want, you can think of
it as a research problem in social statistics.

but the common tech geeking idiots don't understand social issues,
they just take it as my lisp vs your lisp, my lang vs your lang, vi vs
emacs, and went about fucking idiot shits on and on, on and on.

these idiots, what do they do other than my lang vs your lang all
day?? Sure, that is also a enjoyable topic to rant and drivel about,
but the problem is, they never saw there is a important social
question behind it.

(for more about this, see:
• 〈Text Editors Popularity and Market Research〉
http://xahlee.org/emacs/text_editor_trends.html
)

speaking of this... y'know how some programers have math background?
and often physics, engineering, and sometimes literature. Though, it's
rare, nay, none ever, that you find a programer also having a degree
in social sciences (or psychology). That explains their idiocy, in
topics of computing industry issues, such as UI design, lang
popularity, trends, marketing, market research, logo design, human
issues, ...

O, i so enjoy writing 'bout these idiots, let me continue my binge
even with my near RSI symptomps... (god wants to fuck my hand up, i
say to him “fuck u”) ... these shallow idiots... what to do with them?

Ok, maybe let's try a more constructive approach. Let's say, you are
to write a essay, or report. You know, pretent you are now a
journalist, or social scientist writing for some reputable social stat
journal. Suppose your title is “Lisp Popularity in 2000s”. Now, i'm
fairly sure the tech geekers in their life have read one or two such
type of reports. So now, pretend you are such a social scientist, and
try to write such a piece. Y'know? you probably want to provide a
“abstract”, and lots of charts, stats, and references and citations.
Y'know? it might take a year to do, but let's say you short of time
and need to write it in 1 hour. Try your best at this mock report. See
what u come up. Test ur writing skills, and you might pick up one or
two social science research skills!

Xah ∑ xahlee.org ☄