Oh, what I meant was 'if...else', do..while,etc... those things are similar to logical reasoning or problem solving.

Boole, Leibniz, Wittgenstein...

I think that is missing the point; in that most of the world consists of objects and not clean and tidy procedures. Thus when modelling problems that can be more easily expressed in terms of objects then an O-O language will work and it is the language that then does the transformation from objects to the computers preference of procedures.

I would say that what you are suggesting is perfectly valid. However, there are other equally valid ways of looking at programming.

Personally, I would like to see problem solving removed from the idea of programming. Simplistically speaking programming is just syntax and semantics. Problem solving is with analysis, and I believe that they (programming and analysis) should be separated, the divide will be a fuzzy one but it is good to try and keep them apart.

functional programming scares me

It used to scare me too - until I realized I was doing it in Perl already.

Actually, I've been also pushed too functional programming by my VLSI background - in VLSI one has state elements and combinational logic - the latter is kind of functions in functional programming.

The clear separation into stateless functions and state is _the_ thing allowing to formally verify/prove correctness.

And, as I read about OCaml, performance shines where the compiler is able after all these formal transformations due to clear separation and state to well optimize the code - sometimes better than a C++ compiler.

I've heard OCaml is high performance as well, and it has an interpreter so you can test code before compiling. Very cool. Unfortunately, I find the OOP syntax quite heavy. Something like printf.printf.printf.printf().

OCaml does nto force you to use OOP - actually, any OCaml tutorial starts without any OOP whatsoever.

Regarding the

syntax - create a wrapper class in which

becomes

and you'll have just the

.

Yeah, I guess I'll have to do that, thanks. Knowing this makes me want to try to learn OCaml once more (I quit trying when I saw the printf example).