The Shape of Code

O is for Occam, Oberon, Objective-C and OCaml.

Occam might be said to have been the assembly language for the Transputer. INMOS, the company who created the Transputer, did not want the world to know what the actual assembly language was in case people used this information to write compilers, thus making it difficult for INMOS to change the instruction set in future revisions (because they would have to continue to support the existing instructions that the exiting compilers were making use of). Your author knows this because he was at what today would be called a developer launch event (which we had to pay to attend, none of the freebies that are used to woo us today) and during the question&answer session asked why developers were restricted to using the INMOS approved compilers (he was out and about promoting his company’s compiler expertise at the time and also asked “… what should companies who wanted to use a decent compiler do?”).

The Transputer had a great deal of potential and I don’t know how much the work of the software thought police at INMOS nobbled that potential, but they certainly had an impact (we have come up with this world changing approach to how things are done and you must jolly well use it; yes, they really did use phrases like jolly well). A big play was made of the formal proof of correctness of the floating-point unit; when several faults were found in the hardware the thought police were quick to report that the problems were with the specification, not the proof of correctness of the specification (I’m sure this news allayed any concerns that Transputer users might have had).

Oberon created a bit of a problem for those promoting Modula-2 as the successor to Pascal. It was created as the successor of Modula-2 by the person who created Modula-2 as the successor of Pascal (which he also created). Surely nobody would be cruel enough to use the existence of Oberon to mock the Modula-2 true believers 😉

Objective-C has survived within its ecosystem because of Apple’s patronage. A language rising to dominance in an ecosystem because of the patronage of a major vendor is nothing new and in fact might be regarded as the natural state of affairs. Does a vendor need to control the fate of the dominant language in its ecosystem? Maybe not, but the patronage is not that expensive and does provide piece of mind.

OCaml is in many ways the alter-ego of Haskell, its fellow widely used (at least in their world) functional language. Haskell’s Wikipedia page looks so different one could be forgiven for thinking they had nothing on common. The major difference I have noticed is that OCaml gets used by developers creating larger programs that other people are expected to use, while Haskell gets used for the academic stuff where authors have little interest in the code having an external life.