Lambda the Ultimate

I am pleased to announce the second OCaml Summer Project! The OSP is aimed at encouraging growth in the OCaml community by funding students over the summer to work on open-source projects in OCaml. We'll fund up to three months of work, and at the end of the summer, we will fly the participants out for a meeting in New York, where people will present their projects and get a chance to meet with other members of the OCaml community.

The project is being funded and run by Jane Street Capital. Jane Street makes extensive use of OCaml, and we are excited about the idea of encouraging and growing the OCaml community.

Our goal this year is to get both faculty and students involved. To that end, we will require joint applications from the student or students who will be working on the project, and from a faculty member who both recommends the students and will mentor them throughout the project. Each student will receive a grant of $5k/month for over the course of the project, and each faculty member will receive $2k/month. We expect students to treat this as a full-time commitment, and for professors to spend the equivalent of one day a week on the project.

We will also award a prize for what we deem to be the most successful project. Special consideration will be given to projects that display real polish in the form of good documentation, robust build systems, and effective test suites. We'll announce more details about the prize farther down the line.

If you'd like to learn more about the OSP and how to apply, you can look at our website here:

http://ocamlsummerproject.com

Please direct any questions or suggestions you have to osp@janestcapital.com. Also, this might be a nice place for people to leave feedback about the program.

(if one of the editors thought this was appropriate to move to the front page, I would be appreciative. I think it's something that would be of interest to a large part of LtU's readership.)

I'd like to tell a story. I'm an engineer working in the embedded world on compilers and simulators. Bored by the conservative approach to technology that I saw in companies, I started to learn Haskell/OCaml few years ago. It has been a valuable experience, especially for types.

Then, I tried to build a small product. I selected OCaml for practical reasons. I wrote a part of a binary translator. The reuse is great, and the code is amazingly short..

I then explained what I had done to my team. But during a discussion with my boss, I was told that "exotic languages are very similar to exotic holiday locations. You pay a premium to go there, but the only thing that is sure is that you will come back. Quite often, the only tangible trace of your stay is what you let in the hotel bin: an empty bottle of water and some papers. Please rewrite your stuff in C."

My conclusion is -- (1) I won't ever go on holiday with my boss and (2) I'm on the job market :)

Anybody who had a better experience?