I’m Chris Bunch, a student assistant at “Central IT” at Cal State Northridge, and I’d like to build on Ryan’s excellent summary of why this is here with my take on it. Over the last year here at CSUN, the three of us (you’ll see some of Brian’s work someday soon) have had a “unique” experience dealing with the ramblings of IT. We try to maintain a large amount of legacy code written in OCaml, a functional programming language. We’ve seen it used for many things that I never thought I’d see a functional language used for, and in some certainly unique ways.
Now I’m not saying that OCaml sucks, or that functional languages shouldn’t be used for things like web pages or identity management, as it apparently worked fine for everyone who worked at Central IT before us. It’s just the way it was done and the lack of information that was handed off to us that leaves us in a rut whenever shit breaks. In fact, to someone who lacks the thorough knowledge that can only be gained by programming it ourselves or having a complete knowledge transfer, these applications appear to be simply Byzantine at times (told you it was a real computer science term guys!). That pretty much captures the essence of it from my side, but I’ll write more when I become dissatisfied with this later.
Anything I write on here I also have on my personal blog; check it out if you like!