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OCaml Exercises

ocaml.org

105 pointswazbug29 comments

Also: https://cs3110.github.io/textbook/cover.html

Woah... I'm in this class right now. We <3 Prof. Clarkson and his textbook!

please tell him to sell merch. I'm a Michael R. Clarkson super fan and desperately want to show my support in real life. Because of him I learned ocaml and for this I'm forever grateful.

He used to sell merch in previous semesters, there's lots of 3110 sweatshirts around campus. Hopefully he brings it back this semester!

Naive European here. Are you saying that in America academics sell merchandise for their modules? And students, despite having paid exorbitant sums to sit them, go and buy them?

I think that's likely, yes.

It's easy to distance yourself from the cost of tuition when it's paid for through a loan (with predatory interest rates, and no escape through bankruptcy).

Meanwhile, the swag is bought with 'your' money, to support the artist (and good teachers are artists, in the most positive sense of the word).

FWIW I've never heard this happen before. But some courses are very popular with students.

I think Harvard's CS50 hands out yellow rubber ducks to students for free.[1] I see now that you can buy them online, too.[2]

Besides what the sibling post is saying about tuition being earmarked separately from merch, your peers wearing/hauling around course-related merch could also strengthen your impression that the course is good. Therefore you give better course evaluations, which helps your lecturers.

(Lecturers are adjunct faculty which is generally a bad gig.)

[1] https://cs50.harvard.edu/x/2022/

[2] https://www.theharvardshop.com/products/ddb50rubberducks

No, the merchandise is sold at cost. The class is so popular with students, that students want a token to remember it and so they buy clothing embroidered with the class name.

Randomly found this earlier this year. I loved this course. Making this content available freely to anyone anywhere truly makes a difference. Cheers to Prof. Clarkson!

This selection of problems, for those that don't recognize them, is from 99 Prolog Problems

I believe this is something that the page should mention somewhere.

Practicing for a Jane Street interview?

This isn't going to get you very far, it's quite basic and not really OCaml specific. These are classic functional programming examples which would translate easily to other languages.

Incidentally, when I interviewed at JS (long time ago), they didn't even ask me OCaml questions (it was more maths/logic puzzle), but nowadays I think they go toward more FAANG style of interview. While they always attract OCaml/Haskell passionates (including academia dropouts), it would be counter-productive to restrict the pool of candidates to a specific language.

FWIW I don't think Jane Street actually interviews anyone in OCaml except for maybe niche roles.

Jane street specifically recommends not interviewing in ocaml :)

They explicitly say they don't recommend interviewing in OCaml just for the sake of doing so, as that's not going to net you any bonus points. But if that's your preferred language for interviews, it should work as well as any other one. Direct quote:

"We also don’t award bonus points for using a functional language like OCaml. Please don’t use OCaml just because you think it will make us happy. We want to see you at your best, so you should use the language you’re most comfortable with. If OCaml isn’t your strongest language, then don’t use it."[0]

0. https://www.janestreet.com/preparing-for-a-software-engineer...

is there actually companies using OCaml ? other than Jane street ?

Facebook, Microsoft, Bloomberg, Ahrefs, and some companies around Tezos blockchain...

https://ocaml.org/industrial-users

interesting!

Isn't Microsoft more into F#?

Just as Facebook is more into Hack (ok, not as much).

Every new language is converging to ML it seems, like js -> ts -> ReScript, it's also really easy to prototype with ML family module system super easy to bolt on a new feature and the compiler checks for you anything you forgot to refactor (if one was needed).

Only companies outside of web3 specifically hiring for OCaml is Ahrefs I know of except I do get recruiters in uk all the time contacting me for OCaml startup fintech work not jstreet related.

It's like Scheme to me something I enjoy hacking with doesn't have to be employment related. One good use is learning math, there's a book 'Discrete Math and Functional Programming' where you program proofs in Standard ML

We'll be using Ocaml extensively for building out certain aspects of our pharmaceutical research and development platform.

Out of curiosity, why Ocaml instead of (say) Haskell?

Generally, our stance is to prefer strictness, impurity, and clarity of analysis around speed and memory usage, instead of laziness, purity, and elegance. Also I prefer the Ocaml module system and its FFI, though I am wistful about Haskell's typeclasses.

Good to know, thanks!

Hopefully we'll get modular implicits some day, which should help with the typeclass envy ;)

I know of another smaller firm that uses OCaml for their trading. It's beyond me but I believe it's reactive programming, where it's reacting to market data input and other signals.

I was paid to code in Ocaml by the CEA a long time ago. I think INRIA also has position, probably Cambridge too. That might not really help you. On a more serious note, Nomadic Labs was a big employer recently. Bloomberg used to have a small team using it for PL related tooling as did Meta. Docker bought a unikernel company using it.

You sometimes encounter people who are surprising knowledgeable in the language in surprising place in France.

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