OCaml, Language syntax, and Proof Systems

[Xah Lee]

Just a quick relpy.

Jon's tutorial:
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/chapter1.html

is by far the best tutorial of Ocaml.

It is far better than the official intro to ocaml at
“caml.inria.fr” or the popularly cited tutorial at
“ocaml-tutorial.org” .

Jon's tutorial, namely the free chapter 1 of his book, is concise, to
the point, well written, well organized, does not unnecessarily use
abstruse jargons or concepts, does not pitch or preach engineering
practices or paradigms.

Jon's book title says it all: Ocaml for Scientist.
Scientists are intelligent. All programing language tutorials should
be modeled like this. For some detail, see:

• Examples Of Quality Documentation In The Computing Industry
  http://xahlee.org/perl-python/quality_docs.html

Btw, i've learned far more Ocaml in the past 3 days than the about 1
month of full time trying to learn Haskell. Mostly in 2006 or 2007. I
did not even obtain a basic understanding of the syntax. I do not have
a basic understanding of its types or how to define a type (was quite
confused in this). I don't even have a good idea what the lang's
syntactical elements or structural elements or semantic elements. In
fact, i have no basic understanding of the language. I tried. I tried
about 4 online tutorials or downloadable paper-published books. They
are extremely low quality and or idiotic. Half of the time is wasted
on finding a good tutorial or reading unreadable ones, and time is
spent on huge garbage texts about reading why haskell is better or
currying this or monads that (they idiots lacking mathematician's
perspicacity don't really understand the subject). Motherfucking
idiots. (i even tried to start a mailing list and drew a web-badge for
haskell by my enthusiasm. See: A Haskell A Day http://xahlee.org/haskell/haskell.html
(it went no where and is now on hold indefinitely))

I really believed in Haskell, almost just by its “we don't allow
assignments and we have ‘lazy evaluation’”. I believed it for 10
years. No more.

Jon wrote:
> And the freely-available first chapter of The OCaml Journal:
>
>  http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_journal/free/introduction...
>
> I also recommend Jason Hickey's book which, I believe, is due to be
> published by Cambridge University Press soon:
>
>  http://www.cs.caltech.edu/courses/cs134/cs134b/book.pdf

Thanks. Am still reading your chapter 1 yet. Will check those out
later.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄


On Jan 23, 4:36 pm, Jon Harrop <j... at ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
> Xah Lee wrote:
> > ok, i've been reading these Ocaml tutorials in the past few days:
>
> > intro to ocaml, from official site
> > http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/manual003.html
>
> > “Objective CAML Tutorial”, most cited tutorial on the web
> > http://www.ocaml-tutorial.org/
>
> > The best one, is the one is
> > “Introduction to Caml”
> > http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~scott/pl/lectures/caml-intro.html
> > by Dr Scott Smith of Johns Hopkins U, apparently a lecture note.
> > I found it by as one of the top result from google search.
>
> You may also appreciate the freely-available first chapter of my book OCaml
> for Scientists:
>
>  http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/chapter1.html
>
> And the freely-available first chapter of The OCaml Journal:
>
>  http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_journal/free/introduction...
>
> I also recommend Jason Hickey's book which, I believe, is due to be
> published by Cambridge University Press soon:
>
>  http://www.cs.caltech.edu/courses/cs134/cs134b/book.pdf
>
> --
> Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?u