This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz
by Titus Brown.
Original Post: 30 Nov 2004
Feed Title: Advogato diary for titus
Feed URL: http://advogato.org/person/titus/rss.xml
Feed Description: Advogato diary for titus
'''
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...)
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