¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Context #

Historically, I love functional languages. The first family I was introduced to were the lispy ones; more specifically, emacs lisp, then racket, then clojure.

Emacs Lisp is very powerful for its purpose, and I believe the only reason people still use emacs today is because of the power of elisp. Emacs is very extendable and this is not a coincidence: functional languages are very expressive.

Racket was taught to me in a coursera course which intended to teach functional languages and how to design programs with them. It is very cool and nice for beginners, but after learning the basics of FP I don’t see much space for it.

Clojure is lisp for web programming and development. I believe it is the most suitable and useful functional language to learn today (from the lisp family, I mean).

Then we go away from the lisp family; the first most notable language out there that remains now is Haskell. Haskell is very peculiar and is what is called a “pure” functional language, which means that the FP paradigm is forced; there are no imperative ways to do anything with it (well, except after you learn about monads).

While I loved to learn Haskell and discovered it has a huge ecosystem, I don’t think it is the most practical functional language to use today. So…what do we do?

And now #

I then paused my functional programming research/learning for a while, until… I discovered about OCaml. It seems to have a good compromise between the functional and imperative paradigms, but it is functional by nature (but not pure). I am now reading OCaml from the very beginning. It is a very good introdutory book and it is making me like OCaml.

I’ll now see if I will like OCaml more than Haskell. And, more important yet: if it is practical to use in the day to day.

An example – sum of a list:

let rec sum l =
  match l with
    [] -> 0
  | h::t -> h + sum(t)

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