Functional Programming (using Ocaml)

Desire to Code

I wouldn’t claim to have taken a formal programming course and yet I feel confident in being able to come up with programmatic solutions to problems when necessary. This has always felt hacky, and without much direction, I haven’t felt that I could escape this feeling. I’ve considered two ways to address this desire to improve my programming skills.

1. Learn and practice algorithms – Unknowns remain here.
2. Branch into a different way of thinking with programming – Functional programming instead of OOP.

To learn and practise algorithms I need to pick a language. I’m familiar with Python and C, although neither seems like a good choice. Python is syntactically easy but I’ve never considered it useful beyond scripting. The worry with C is that I’ll be fighting the syntax just as much as the algorithm implementation. Rust carries the same concerns as C, but at least I might get better help with errors.

The second task is finding the list of algorithms to implement. There are plenty of resources, I just need to pick one. Pairing this with Advent of Code problems will surely help keep everything refreshed in my mind.

Functional Programming

Although I’ve not had formal OOP training, it’s still the most utilised way to code (at least on the surface of the internet). So whatever I might have learned through the years would have been through an OOP lens. As a change of pace, I wanted to explore functional programming to see what I could learn from the experience.

There are great resources for that online for free as well.

• OCaml from the very beginning
• OCaml Programming: Correct + Efficient + Beautiful

Peculiar titles aside, working through the first book and exercises has been interesting, as I can see the complexity that comes from adopting a recursive thinking style.

Once I’ve finished the first book I will look at the second one, which is much more interactive. It will either be as useful or it will supplement knowledge, so it’s more likely that I will skim through it.

Halfway through the first book, I began to keep track of the exercises and questions, and they now live on a GitHub repo of mine for posterity. I did look back on the first 5 chapters, and most of the interesting exercises ended up in the utils.ml file, so I haven’t bothered repeating them.