Fun and Profit with OCaml

As students and staff from FP Launchpad, IIT Madras (https://fplaunchpad.org/), we are happy to have this opportunity to introduce IndiaFOSS participants to the OCaml programming language. FP Launchpad is a new research centre at IIT Madras that “aims to build long-term research and educational capacity in functional programming, bringing together principled programming languages and systems research, open artefacts, and the training of future researchers and engineers.”

OCaml is one among several functional programming languages, F#, Haskell, Scala, Racket, Rust, and Standard ML, currently in use in industry and academia. With its robust support for functional programming features such as first-class functions, algebraic data types, and pattern matching enforced through a type-checking system built on static types, polymorphism, and type inference, the language ensures construction of programs safe from entire classes of errors. Features such as garbage collection and strict evaluation make modelling problems in OCaml simpler while providing a sleek, portable language to build with. 

We hope that introducing participants to the language and the tools needed to get started will encourage them to explore both the language itself and the community built around it when looking for a programming language for their open-source goals. 

• Participants will work through hands-on exercises to pick up a new language

• The content of the workshop will be tailored to beginners but paced in such a way that most participants should be able to work through the first few lessons to begin learning the functional features of the language.

• At the end of the workshop, participants will be provided with a list of resources for further study and participation in the OCaml community.