''' There is a joke about American engineers and French engineers. The American team brings a prototype to the French team. The French team's response is: "Well, it works fine in practice; but how will it hold up in theory?" ''' -- unknown, via Mike Vanier.

OCaml, Python/WSGI, and scalable programming:

Spent some time over the last few days "learning" OCaml, by which I mean reading first the C++/Java programmer's intro to OCaml and then an OCaml tutorial. This is all part of an effort to broaden my horizons: I enjoy using Python and C to solve problems on a daily basis, but I've never learned a functional programming language. Man, is it frustrating to pick up a new language -- I feel completely helpless to even write even the simplest program. This is compounded by my complete inability to think recursively...

I'm looking into OCaml because several different computer-geek friends suggested I try it out. Since all of them profess a love of Python, yet are wiser and more experienced than I in the ways of programming languages (I guess a CS background is useful for something...) I decided to buckle down and study OCaml a bit. So far I've gained an appreciation for the cleverness of OCaml and OCaml programmers, marvelled at 'match', and realized how cool currying is. Not bad for two days ;).

In other news, David Warnock pointed out in his blog that my simple Thanksgiving Day WSGI wrapper for SCGI might be the best-performing WSGI server around, because it's built on top of mod_scgi/SCGI. mod_scgi/SCGI is already fully functional and used for "real" Web sites that run Quixote, and my leetle SWAP code effectively turns this into a full-blown WSGI server. Cool. It seemed too easy to implement, though, so I must be missing some aspect of the WSGI master plan -- why hasn't Webware done this yet, for example?

In connection with that, I've been thinking that an interesting project would be to implement an SCGI server in OCaml. I don't see anything like it out there on the projects page, and it wouldn't take that long to do...

Last but not least, as part of my OCaml adventure, I came across Mike Vanier's rant on the scalability of languages. In it he says, or implies, many things that I wish I could have said more clearly. Things like "The right way to use languages like C is to implement small, focused low-level components of applications written primarily in higher-level languages". Yeah, that.

Mike is one of the three people that suggested I learn OCaml, so I'm a bit saddened by his epilogue in which he turns a little bit away from OCaml (for good reasons, it sounds like, but nonetheless...)

--titus