Tea-time on the Titanic

Gah! I'm going down! I've got more fun things to do than I can possibly
make time for!

In addition to the microscope, the PS2, the monthly subscriptions
to Scientific American and Atlantic Monthly, the
weekly subscription to New Scientist (I've given up all
pretense of keeping up with those), the ReplayTV and my
self-paced study of Haskell (and let's not forget that Spring is here,
and the roads are drying up enough for me to try taking out the bike
again), I've got another distraction coming up!

Recall that I've been studying functional programming for a short
while, really only taking a couple hours a week, using the
Haskell programming language as a
launching point. Over time I've formed a (weak) opinion that
Haskell is not suited to the performance intensive applications that I
tend to work on.

So I have been casting around for a candidate, and I think that
Objective Caml (Ocaml for short)
is a good enough choice. Where Haskell is a 'pure, non-strict,
functional language', Ocaml is an 'impure, strict functional language
with imperative features'. So there is enough orthogonality to make
things interesting, especially considering that the syntax of the two is
so different. Moreover, Ocaml has won first and second place in last
year's Functional Programming Languages contest (I forget the official
name).

But it is an academic language, so documentation is usually of
the form "if you understand the language, this documentation will make
perfect sense." Not a lot of help for an outsider. So I ordered the
only book on Ocaml in the English language (it's designers are
French professors). And it arrived today! Gah!