Where a rather bumpy journey unfolds ...

Out of curiosity I picked in 2007 this rather dense book in the IT corner of a Toulouse book shop: "Programmation fonctionnelle, générique et objet" from P. Narbel (unfortunately for English readers this is only available in French...and also it now seems out of print).

The book focuses on the concepts of functional programming, using Ocaml as a platform to experiment with. This approach, starting from the concepts and showing their application with small code examples, is clearly very didactic.

Having digested most of this material over several months, I said to myself : "why not try it out and use Ocaml on a personal project ?", having in mind to create a tool to assist with the learning of the Japanese language.

This is where things got rather complicated...but at the same time enlightening...

Having worked for 2 decades using imperative programming languages (C, Perl, Java, JavaScript), my recent experience with JavaScript was quite revealing that functional programming allows for a very concise and rather natural way of expressing concepts.

However the functional programming part is not really the challenging bit :P

What is really challenging is the setup of this not so mainstream technology on my personal computer, namely a Mac OS X (10.4 a.k.a. Tiger) with Xcode 2.2 and a PostgreSQL 8.0 database.

A practical software project involves installing tons of artifacts (integrated development environment, libraries, and so forth...), which is a rather daunting task.

This is the purpose of this blog, to provide solutions that I did not find anywhere else on the web, even though there are tons of material scattered out there.

I claim no copyright or intellectual property rights on the material posted in this blog, but would greatly appreciate that anybody would give feedback on the solutions I provide.

The motto is simply to be useful.

Ronan Tanguy

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