On 16 December 2000, a young @dra1 stepped out on to the stage of St Martin-in-the-Fields making what would be the first of many performances of Johann Sebastian Bach’s great Mass in B minor. On 16 November last year, just under 25 years later, a slightly greyer @dra27 stepped out on the stage of King’s Hall at Newcastle University for what, for now at least2, would be his last performance of this great work3. As I write this in the 9 hour window of unemployment between finishing at the University of Cambridge and Tarides and commuting down to 2½ Devonshire Square to start at Jane Street, it’s a new year and a change of course.

My professional life to now has always been a balancing act between the arts and technology (perhaps a rollercoaster would be a better analogy; balancing act somehow evokes the elegance and skill of a trapeze artist). I’ve mused before on some of the common threads that drive me; more recently I’ve been musing on more fundamental similarities. Many years ago, I remember in some Cathedral or other being told of the various carvings which exist in hidden parts of these buildings; art created not to be seen, at least by human eyes. Amongst others, restorations at Salisbury Cathedral uncovered such carvings. Effort expended not for human reward, but for its own worth or, one could say, ad maiorem Dei gloriam. Or, in technology, The Right Thing™. The right thing is what instantly drew me to functional programming back way before it was cool and shortly after the “27” had been added to “dra”. The pragmatic approach of OCaml trying to balance the safety, correctness, and Right Thing of functional programming with the need to write performant programs in a less Right Thing-like world made it a natural choice for a young professional singer writing and maintaining small systems written on trains, planes and hotels around the world! It’s continued to draw me in over the last 9 years.

But for me the art is made to be seen. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when live performance became impossible, I remember spending many months at home unable, or at least unwilling, to sing. Without even the colleagues to perform with, let alone the audience to consume the result, there was no purpose. And so too the perfect software is without purpose without users4. In championing and furthering Windows OCaml, I chose the niche of a niche, but I am hugely proud that today every Windows user of OCaml benefits (hopefully!) from the work I both did, and spearheaded others to do too. Likewise, every Windows user running winget install opam begins their journey in OCaml following my vision of how it should work, thanks to the seemingly boundless patience and efforts of my opam co-maintainers!

Behind all this, though, are the companies which allowed this to happen: first at OCaml Labs at the University of Cambridge and then spinning out into Tarides. And behind all that is Jane Street. After I started at OCaml Labs back in 2016, I explained to (mainly musical) colleagues that I was carrying on doing the open source work I’d been doing for the previous 10 years, but that somehow that had become work one could be paid to do (I can’t underscore enough how inconceivable the idea of that would have felt in 2006). That inevitably led to the question “so what do they get out of it?” - and the inevitable surprise that the answer was, directly at least, nothing. Windows opam represented work on a platform with no business case on an unused tool. The OCaml community was - is - the benefit.

Which makes this week feel less a change of course and more a continuation. OxCaml represents to me the evolution of the pragmatism that drew me to OCaml in the first place. And we’ve definitely got users! This year, like last year, is clearly going to be interesting. I think as we continue to navigate the whirlwind of agentic engineering, we’re going to care more and more about the foundation it’s all sat on, especially the compilers. Let’s hope they continue to strive to do the Right Thing™. And let’s see how this looks next year! So, here goes…

open Core

The cat’s out of the bag

  1. the “27” wouldn’t be allocated until the next October ↩

  2. never say never… ↩

  3. I’ve never recorded the work, although I recorded Ach, bleibe doch from Himmelfahrtsoratorium BWV 11 with Musik Podium Stuttgart ten years ago, which is one of the source arias for the famous Agnus Dei of the mass ↩

  4. Perhaps I should adopt sine usoribus sine proposito as a motto ↩