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#ocaml#makeillegalstatesunrepresentable#janestreet

Effective ML

Jane Street

102K subscribers • 18 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 3 people: 2 on Hacker News and 1 on Lobsters.
  • Presented by Yaron Minsky, Head of Technology at Jane Street

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

29K views10 years ago3 recommendations

Programming languagesSoftware designFunctional programmingDesign patternsOCaml and F#

Yaron Minsky shares practical advice on being an effective OCaml programmer in industry, introducing the concept of making invalid states impossible.

A talk given at Harvard's CS51 class in 2010 (which is taught in OCaml), with a collection of suggestions about how to be an effective ML programmer in an industrial setting

Why it's here

3 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended for introducing the highly influential 'make illegal states unrepresentable' programming technique.

jasimon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Book Review: A Philosophy of Software Design”

That'll be a great addition to the book. Can I also recommend Yaron Minsky's talk on OCaml, specifically the part where he talks about "making invalid states impossible": link to this video I've found this to be the single most valuable programming technique I've learnt. Richard Feldman dives deeper into the topic with a lot more examples in link
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dbremneron Lobsters • Recommends

Effective ML - Yaron Minsky (2010)
4View on Lobsters

chilleeon Hacker News • Recommends

On “What Made Lisp Different (2002)”

I guess the closest thing to what you want in Ocaml is modular implicits. link As far as the tradeoff, my view on types is a bit different than yours, I think. First, a quick note: > specify manually all the types of all the functions This is usually encouraged in OCaml, in the form of a .mli file. I think types can be a lot more than "compiler checked documentation that can also work as basic tests". They allow you to encode invariants that allow the compiler to check more than basic stuff. I thought this video had a good example. link to this video
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marshrayon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Why Co–Star Uses Haskell”

"Make illegal states unrepresentable" is usually attributed to Yaron Minsky of Jane Street. This video shows it at 28:02. link link to this video
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