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Comment by amirmc | Hacker News Reader

More OCaml code coming out of FB. Can add this to the list, which includes, Hack, Flow and Pfff [1].

The kinds of bugs it finds are listed at: http://fbinfer.com/docs/infer-bug-types.html

It's interesting to see how building tools with languages like OCaml can reduce bugs for teams, without them having to change the language itself. I do wonder what things would be like if such languages we're used directly more widely.

[1] http://ocaml.org/learn/companies.html

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Legend has it there is a small room at FBHQ, containing a quorum of OCaml committers, all of them French for some reason, hacking away at level of abstraction beyond the ken of mortal man.

That's not a legend, it's true since they're doing a partnership with INRIA where OCaml was born. Those French computer scientists know something that American companies don't and that's that theory is important as an underlying foundation for extraordinary results.

I'd actually expand that to European - in my grad studies, the European CS world had a much more mathematical bent. Notice the the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, Coq, etc.

You can always go from math -> pragmatism, but the reverse is nearly impossible. People get set in their ways, and it takes time to develop mathematical rigor, even if you want to.

So when you need to get mathematical expertise, you wind up needing to hire it.

room for all... zuck employs these guys and is anything but

I'm posting from that very room right now.

I like this plot .. May be OCaml Movie :)

21 Jane Street

I guess, the OCaml committers are French, because Ocaml was invented by French dudes?

A pretty sizable chunk of the OCaml world is French. It was developed at INRIA, yeah, and maintains a lot of presence there. It's actually a tiny bit difficult from time to time in OCaml to find English resources.

We use Pfff internally to generate code-graph of large polyglot code-bases (think AOSP). This graph powers the querying engine that finds all tests to be run given a diff. It is incredibly useful. My only gripe is that Pfff isn't being maintained. Pfff can barely support Java 7, let alone Java 8. C/CPP support isn't as extensive as is for PHP. How I wish Pfff was being actively maintained...

I've found Sourcegraph's srclib.org (Go) and Google's kythe.io (Cpp, Go) make some interesting strides in the static analysis field as well.

IMO, treating code as query-able data can open up a lot of possibilities, and OCaml suites the field like a glove.

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