[Discuss] Functional programming @ UVic (was 'C' string tokenizer for those who hate strtok)

[Deryk Barker]

Adam Parkin wrote:

> David Bronaugh wrote:
>
>>> Does anyone in town work in OCaml?  I'd love to hear about some
>>> real-life examples.  I love new languages, and OCaml looks interesting.
>>>   
>>
>> Me, my friend Taras, a few other people at UVic play around with 
>> OCaml and other ML-based languages.
>>
>
> Yeah, Taras is something of a functional programming evangelist now. 
> =8->  He was converted to the way of ML by my grad supervisor George 
> Tzanetakis who is a big-time functional programming propaganda artist. 
> =;-p

If you want a counter to the "functional programming is all very well 
for academics, but no good for real world applications" argument, try 
erlang.

British Telecom run the world's largest telephony over ATM network, 
powered by Ericsson AXE301 switchs - and 1.25 million lines of erlang.

They have achieved "nine nines" uptime, i.e. 99.9999999%, which allows 
them to be offline for 32 milliseconds a year.

There's also a web server written in erlang which outperforms apache at 
high loads by at least an order of magnitude.

And the language is pretty simple too, simpler than say Haskell 
(although, thankfully, syntactically more complex than scheme :-)

And Ericsson have made an open source version of the language and the 
OTP (Open Telephony Project) applications and libraries.

www.erlang.org