OCaml OpenGL - Get into Gear!
OCaml and OpenGL - Getting our Functional Programming into Gear! In my blog post for this day, I thought I’d take a look at the OCaml OpenGL library, lablgl. If you’re not already familair with openGL, I strongly suggest that you take a look at one of the tutorials available online. One that I found to be very informative; although written in c++, is opengl-tutorial. Nonetheless, in this post, we’ll look at some simple, and not so simple examples written in OCaml. Continue reading
Exercism - Get your Code Deamons Out! Heal Your Body!
Exercis(m) The best way to keep the mind, body, and soul sharp is to exercise! No better way to learn new programming paradigms than following this same precept when learning new concepts in an unfamiliar programming language. There are several sites online that afford noobs practice problems - Hackerrank, kaggle to name a few. But one that I recently came across, exercism.io, aims to provide not just programming exercises, but a community of folks committed to commenting and sharing both code and criticism on implementations to problem sets across many languages. Continue reading
Riding the Camel Deeper into the Desert of Code: Records and Variants
Extending and Encapsulating Data - Records and Variants Up next on our tour of OCaml are records and variants. If you are familiar with typedef, struct, and union in c/c++, you’ll quickly come to understand how to use records and variants in OCaml. We’ll start off looking at records, how to define them, use them in functions, and automatically generate common functions from our type definitions. There’s more to the eye than what you get in a language like c, so pay close attention as we move through the descriptions below. Continue reading
Let's Get Funky with the Camel
How many ways can we get Fun(ky) In any programming paradigm, it’s critical to understand how we write functions - be they traditional imperative , anonymous , recursive, or functional. In this post, I will break down the different types of functions that you can write in OCaml. Let’s start by examining the imperative function. Here’s a simple function that prints out the phrase Hello World! $n$ times, once on each line, and returns the value $n$ as its result. Continue reading
OCaml Hello World and more
Well Hello There! As tradition has it, every new programming language experience must begin with the basic Hello World. Let’s walk the the basics of how to set up our development environment specifically for OCaml and demonstrate how to compile our basic program. Warming up our Environment Of course we could just use our vanilla editor to enter our OCaml programs, but a more efficient work environment leverages an extensible editor that is aware of our programming language. Continue reading