Real World OCaml: Functional programming for the masses

What's the animal featured on the cover?

The animal on the cover of Real World OCaml is the Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus). The Bactrian camel, one of two species of camel, is native to Central Asia and hasbeen used domestically in the area for thousands of years. Even though there are overtwo million domesticated Bactrian camels, only about a thousand are considered wild. The Bactrian camel is a large animal at 6 to 7.5 feet in height and 7.4 to 11.5 feet inlength. An adult will typically weigh between 660 and 2,200 pounds. The Bactrian camelis distinctive for its two large humps on their back, hefty wooly coat, and dark browncolor. It is a herbivore that will eat all kinds of vegetation, though they have been knownto feed on dead animals.

Humans have domesticated the Bactrian camel for travel purposes because of its greatnatural resiliency. For example, the Bactrian camel can thrive in habitats of both extremecold and heat. It can also go without water for months and when water is available itcan consume up to 55 litres. The cover image is from Meyers Kleines Lexicon. The cover fonts are URW Typewriterand Guardian Sans. The text font is Adobe Minion Pro; the heading font is AdobeMyriad Condensed; and the code font is Dalton Maag’s Ubuntu Mono.

Yaron Minsky heads the Technology group at Jane Street, a proprietary trading firm that is the largest industrial user of OCaml. He was responsible for introducing OCaml to the company and for managing the company's transition to using OCaml for all of its core infrastructure. Today, billions of dollars worth of securities transactions flow each day through those systems. Yaron obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University, where he studied distributed systems. Yaron has lectured, blogged and written about OCaml for years, with articles published in Communications of the ACM and the Journal of Functional Programming. He chairs the steering committee of the Commercial Users of Functional Programming, and is a member of the steering committee for the International Conference on Functional Programming.

Anil Madhavapeddy is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, based in the Systems Research Group. He was on the original team that developed the Xen hypervisor, and helped develop an industry-leading cloud management toolstack written entirely in OCaml. This XenServer product has been deployed on hundreds of thousands of physical hosts, and drives critical infrastructure for many Fortune 500 companies. Prior to obtaining his PhD in 2006 from the University of Cambridge, Anil had a diverse background in industry at Network Appliance, NASA and Internet Vision. In addition to professional and academic activities, he is an active member of the open-source development community with the OpenBSD operating system, is co-chair of the Commercial Uses of Functional Programmingworkshop, and serves on the boards of startup companies such as Ashima Arts where OCaml is extensively used.

Jason Hickey is a Software Engineer at Google Inc. in Mountain View, California. He is part of the team that designs and develops the global computing infrastructure used to support Google services, including the software systems for managing and scheduling massively distributed computing resources. Prior to joining Google, Jason was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Caltech, where his research was in reliable and fault-tolerant computing systems, including programming language design, formal methods, compilers, and new models of distributed computation. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University, where he studied programming languages. He is the author of the MetaPRL system, a logical framework for design and analysis of large software systems; OMake, an advanced build system for large software projects. He is the author of the textbook, An Introduction to Objective Caml (unpublished).