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Full Time: Software Developer (Functional Programming) at Jane Street in New York, NY; London, UK; Hong Kong — Github OCaml jobs, 13 Jun 2013

Software Developer (Functional Programming)

Jane Street is looking to hire great software developers with an interest in functional programming. OCaml, a statically typed functional programming with similarities to Haskell, Scheme, Erlang, F# and SML, is our language of choice. We’ve got the largest team of OCaml developers in any industrial setting, and probably the world’s largest OCaml codebase. We use OCaml for running our entire business, supporting everything from research to systems administration to trading systems. If you’re interested in seeing how functional programming plays out in the real world, there’s no better place.

The atmosphere is informal and intellectual. There is a focus on education, and people learn about software and trading, both through formal classes and on the job. The work is challenging, and you get to see the practical impact of your efforts in quick and dramatic terms. Jane Street is also small enough that people have the freedom to get involved in many different areas of the business. Compensation is highly competitive, and there’s a lot of room for growth.

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mlorg — OCamlCore Forge Projects, 13 Jun 2013mlorg is a parser written in OCaml for org-mode files (emacs mode). The goal of mlorg is to provide the user with the tools to export freely his documents without relying on emacs and to access to the information contained in them. ocaml-hdfs — OCamlCore Forge Projects, 12 Jun 2013Bindings to HDFS Caml Weekly News, 11 Jun 2013 — Caml Weekly News, 11 Jun 2013Ocamlnet-3.6.5 / post-doc position at MSR-Inria / ocaml-ctypes, a library for calling C functions directly from OCaml / Core Suite 109.27.00 + core_kernel / OCaml on zLinux / Use-site variance in OCaml / New Book: OCaml from the Very Beginning / Deadline extension: OCaml 2013, new deadline on June 18 (anywhere on earth) / Findlib-1.4 / Other Caml News New book: OCaml from the Very Beginning — Coherent Graphics, 10 Jun 2013I've written a concise but self-contained introduction to writing computer programs with OCaml, suitable for the talented beginner to programming, or someone trying functional programming or OCaml for the first time. On your local Amazon: http://asin.info/a/0957671105 E-book: http://www.ocaml-book.com Sample chapters also at http://www.ocaml-book.com Thanks to all those who reviewed and proof-read ... Now available on Amazon — OCaml Book, 07 Jun 2013

OCaml from the Very Beginning (204pp, paperback) is now available on Amazon for $34.99 / €29.99 / £24.99, as well as an e-book from ocaml-book.com for $14.99. Here are preview chapters and a .zip of the examples and exercises

Here's the blurb: 

In OCaml from the Very Beginning John Whitington takes a no-prerequisites approach to teaching a modern general-purpose programming language. Each small, self-contained chapter introduces a new topic, building until the reader can write quite substantial programs. There are plenty of questions and, crucially, worked answers and hints.
OCaml from the Very Beginning will appeal both to new programmers, and experienced programmers eager to explore functional languages such as OCaml. It is suitable both for formal use within an undergraduate or graduate curriculum, and for the interested amateur.

Please do review the book on Amazon if you have the chance.

 

OCaml◎Scope : a new OCaml API search by names and types — Caml Spotting 〈noreply(at)blogger.com (Jun Furuse)〉, 06 Jun 2013The first public preview version of OCaml◎Scope is now available at http://oco.furuse.info/oco.

It supports:

  • Fast: on memory DB.
  • Friendly with OCamlFind packages: names are prefixed with the OCamlFind package name it belongs to. 
  • Friendly with OPAM: each OCamlFind package knows which OPAM package installed it.
  • Auto extraction of OCamlDoc comments.
  • Edit distance based path and type search.
Currently, the state of OCaml◎Scope is still at the proof-of-concept level. Many things to be done, search result tweak, UI, tools, etc... but so far, I am happy with its search speed and rather small memory consumption. Currently it has nearly 150k entries (100 OCamlFind packages including lablgtk, core, batteries, ocamlnet and eliom) takes 2secs maximum per search.

Flowing faster: foundations — Jamie Brandon, 04 Jun 2013

I’ve spent the last few years using Gnome 2 and xmonad on Ubuntu. Since both Ubuntu and the Gnome foundation have dropped support for Gnome 2 I’m going to be forced to upgrade sooner or later. Fortunately I have a two week holiday followed by a new desktop at my new job, so now is a good time to break things on my laptop.

Choices

Almost all of my work happens in bash, emacs, firefox and xmonad. What these have in common, to various extents, is what Mr Yegge likes to call living software. This breaks down the interaction barrier and allows them to grow beyond point-and-grunt into an extension of my mind. This is what I look for in any system I’m going to spend lots of time with.

Unity has the HUD which is basically a CLI for individual applications. There is plugin support via Compiz but nobody seems to be writing any. It’s also incredibly closely tied to Ubuntu and despite all the good they have done some of their recent decisions have been worrying. Individually, they are each sensible and justified but taken as a whole they make me a little nervous about investing heavily in Unity. It’s a shame, because I would love to use the Ubuntu phone.

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Caml Weekly News, 04 Jun 2013 — Caml Weekly News, 04 Jun 2013OPAM and packaging / ~/.opam design / opam packages wrapped inside a spec file / A modern meta programming system for OCaml / Interfacing with QtQuick 2.0 from Qt5, RFC / Ocamlnet-3.6.4 / automatic extaction of the .mli (and a little more) from the .ml / Other Caml News Flowing faster: saving the cloud — Jamie Brandon, 02 Jun 2013

While we’re on the subject of backups – like most people, I rely pretty heavily on cloud services. It sort of snuck up on me. I’m generally trying to move towards using cloud services as dumb servers so I can easily replace them. The first step is to be able to export and backup all my data.

I considered using The Locker Project for backing up cloud services, but it appears that Singly have pivoted from ‘control your own data’ to ‘give all your data to us’. Back to the drawing board…

I use OPML Support and Brief to replace google reader and Evolution to back up google mail, calendar and contacts. My address is on my own domain and managed by google apps. I don’t yet use a local mail reader but Evolution looks like a reasonable fallback if I have to drop gmail.

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