[ruby-talk:18487] Re: Ruby vs. Objective Caml

"Todd Gillespie" <[e-mail]> wrote in message
news:9jkqck$m74$[e-mail]...
> Steve Tuckner <[e-mail]> wrote:
> : I was recently introduced to Objective Caml ( http://www.ocaml.org
> : <http://www.ocaml.org> ) but haven't had the time to understand it yet.

I thought I had already posted - I was just about to post a request on Ruby
vs. OCaml.

At the great shootout editorial, you'll find OCaml, then Ruby mentioned:

http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/editorial.shtml (what should I do
without Google :)

> : * Its very fast - many times it is as fast as straight C (I think speed
is a
....
> Can you back this one up?  It is true that pure functionals allow for some
Since I just did my research:
It has a rather fast bytecode, and on many platforms there a native pipeline
optimized assembler. But there is, of course, more to speed than that.

> : * It is a functional language and thus the programs written in it are
more
> : possible to prove correct
What really matters here, is whether the tools for doing that is readily
available. For practical purposes this is therefore irrelevant, for
theoretical purposes, Haskell is probably a better choice.

> This is true.  But pure functionals (Haskell in particular) can be
> notoriously difficult to use with foreign data, as integrating with the
> type system can be troublesome.

Actually OCaml has a very clean C language interface _linker_. It goes both
ways, and certainly is cleaner than the Ruby approach - despite the Ruby API
is cleaner than most other interfaces.
OCaml also has COM intergration, although I can say how well that is.

> : * It is interpreted so it can be easily run everywhere

Or compiled - whatever you choose. Very flexible runtime.

> : * With object extensions, it can do all the things that object languages
can
> : do

Yes, but is it really better. How does it manage large projects. How does
the includes work? How well does this integrate with the functional
programming?
I certainly do like the object approach.

I'm looking hard for something more powerful than C++.
Ruby is a hard contender, also in expressiveness, although Haskell and the
likes are hart to beat. Not sure about OCaml though. Haskell with lazy
evaluation has some supernatural features I'm not sure that I'm prepared for
yet. It *knows* all prime numbers in the world. It least it does after two
lines of code.

> This may be true, but one of the pleasing things about Ruby is its
> clean object syntax.  Extensions onto a language tend not to be as clean.

Oh yes - many of the examples I were looking it kept me wondering - but that
would have been at least as easy in Ruby. I guess the not-easily understood
higherlevel functions and functor stuff is where you really see the
difference. But then Ruby also has something similar - but I reckon that
part of Ruby is not nearly as clean as the equivalent functional languages.
I may be wrong.

> You have an interesting omission -- the ML type system, which is IMOH, the
> most valuable thing about the ML family.  It's a sophisticated static type
> system that infers all types -- no type declarations.  As this is
> traditionally what draws people to the MLs, you should look into it.

It's strange but I like strong typing, and I like weak typing. Strong typing
often prevents you from doing things, or if you get to do them, you loose
flexibility or typesafety (say Java / C++). A language that gives me
typesafety without the effort and gives me real expressive power is most
welcome (if it is also fast in runtime).

> : Downsides? I don't know enough about it to know. One may be that it is
> : difficult to learn but that may just be my ignorance of the functional
> : programming paradigm.

Downside: there are other languages that could possibly be more expressive,
and the support lib may be to small by comparison.

Other languages I just went over this evening: Clean, Erlang, Haskell.
Erlang is a giant to install. You don't compile it into your C++ app for
certain. But might be very strong serverside. Clean - just started look at
it. They claim to be on par with C in performance.

> : My question to the list is: Are object-oriented functional languages the
> : future instead of Ruby?

With the added computing power, combined with much improved compiler
technology may well make the change. But Ruby is not far from these
languages.

If you took a look at my interfaces? post recently, I had a case expression
based on the type of a list member. Functional programming has a lot of
cases, called guards and referred to as pattern matching. You do not need to
write an awful lot more code than these functional languages to do similar
things in Ruby. Ruby has pattern matching for strings, this could be
extended to datatypes. What about regular type expressions on arrays?

The greatest disadvantage of Ruby vs. functional programming is that Matz do
not have enough hours in the day to write an optimized compiler that will
implement functional style efficiently. He may also not have the necessary
skills since optimized functional compilers are the fruits of years of
advanced research.

I think overall, Ruby is one of the best languages around even if it is not
as powerful as some. But OCaml seem to have better compiler / runtime
capabilities, which really matters a lot in software development. But just
improved runtime performance of Ruby as it is, combined with faster XML
processing, and you have a strong server platform.
However, for the time being, Ruby lives in the realms of scripting languages
where it could be so much more.

But what is it with these Lisp macros?

Mikkel

language comparison links
http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/comp.lang.misc/language_comparisons.html