[Haskell-cafe] Why are OCaml and Haskell being used at these companies?

[Jules Bean]

Laurent Deniau wrote:
> Henning Thielemann wrote:
>> On Tue, 13 Nov 2007, Jon Harrop wrote:
>>
>>> On Tuesday 13 November 2007 08:41, Henning Thielemann wrote:
>>>> On Tue, 13 Nov 2007, Jon Harrop wrote:
>>>>> Penetration is highest in parts of industry where small groups of
>>>>> talented programmers get together, most notably startups. Look at
>>>>> XenSource, Wolfram Research, The MathWorks,
>>>> ?? Mathematica and MatLab are just the opposite of statically safe
>>>> programming.
>>> Absolutely. I was referring to a prototype Mathematica JIT compiler 
>>> (developed
>>> in OCaml),
>>
>> interesting
>>
>>> the FFT routines in MATLAB (FFTW: written in OCaml) and the SML software
>>> that The MathWorks sell.
>>
>> I see, but FFTW was not developed by MathWorks, but by Matteo Frigo and
>> Steven G. Johnson (says fftw.org),
> 
> Right, and it is not written in OCaml but in C. The OCaml code 
> _generates_ optimized C code for the arch where it matters.

That sounds like 'written in ocaml' to me.

That's no more written in C than java code is written in assembly, just 
because the JIT generates optimised assembly code...

I would say it's "written in" the language which the authors wrote it. 
The fact that they wrote it to generate some C code and then compile it: 
well, they're just a clever bunch :-)

Jules