Hello!

I hope 2026 is going well for you. I spent a good chunk of January building things around Functional Programming Strategies: writing the Typst code to bring back exercise solutions, and setting up a site for the book.

I'm very pleased to announce that early access copies are now on sale. If you buy the PDF now you'll get continual updates until the final version is released. Grab a copy and be one of the first to own Functional Programming Strategies—but not the first; that sold yesterday! If you're after a paper copy, however, you'll have to wait a bit longer.

Over the Christmas break I decided to learn a bit more OxCaml, Jane Street's systems programming variant of OCaml. You can view OxCaml as a more ergonomic Rust: control over memory allocation and layout is opt-in, and you can always fall back on the garbage collector when performance is not critical.

I wrote up some of my initial explorations, including a simple example where I removed essentially all memory allocation by switching to unboxed values. The documentation is not great at this point, but I think the overall vision is compelling.

That's all for now. I've got some writing to get back to!

Regards,
Noel