From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id IAA27056; Sat, 24 Mar 2001 08:56:29 +0100 (MET) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id IAA27429 for ; Sat, 24 Mar 2001 08:56:28 +0100 (MET) Received: from harrier.prod.itd.earthlink.net (harrier.prod.itd.earthlink.net [207.217.121.12]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id f2O7uQv22456 for ; Sat, 24 Mar 2001 08:56:27 +0100 (MET) Received: from SFOWVCHAK1L7 (pool0083.cvx21-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net [209.179.192.83]) by harrier.prod.itd.earthlink.net (EL-8_9_3_3/8.9.3) with SMTP id XAA11881; Fri, 23 Mar 2001 23:56:19 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <000f01c0b438$e4276850$53c0b3d1@SFOWVCHAK1L7> Reply-To: "Vijay Chakravarthy" From: "Vijay Chakravarthy" To: , "Arturo Borquez" Cc: References: <20010324031758.28116.cpmta@c012.sfo.cp.net> Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Why People Aren't Using OCAML? (was Haskell) Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2001 00:03:18 -0800 Organization: VerticalNet Solutions MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400 Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk We are also trying to use Ocaml out here, mainly for prototyping purposes (at least thats the way I'll introduce it to the rest of the org.) Once they find that rewriting the prototypes in java takes 10 times the effort..... The main difficulties we have faced have been -- a) Education - Out here even for people skilled in scheme and some other functional languages, it is challenging to learn ocaml. My team found it easier to learn erlang, for example. However, people love the strong type checking, and the fact that if it compiles its likely to run correctly... The english translation of the horse book should help. b) As I mentioned in a previous message, support for Windows is weak. Many of us use Linux for development, but our sales team, which would show off the demos and prototypes, has windows laptops. Therefore the need to show off web apps on windows. Difficulties in building important packages (like pxp) on windows, plus the need to write even simple things like web servers, and database interfaces etc is a painful situation. With some difficulty we could compile many of the packages, but its not as smooth as it should be. Also fork based web server/services (such as in the geneweb distribution) will not work on windows. A select based single threaded web server would be really useful (By web server I am not referring necessarily to a full fledged web server, but rather services that are accessible through a http interface) c) Package availability is fragmented. I have a good idea of various packages etc, but to a newcomer, there is no single place to track down code examples. Plus larger packages like Ensemble, Geneweb etc contain modules that would be useful in general, but that is visible only when one peruses the source code of such packages. On the other hand, the language and the libraries are excellent. Plus functional programming languages are IDEAL for the type of work we do, which is in the enterprise software space. Things like bills of materials, available to promise engines etc are quite entertaining to deal with in the context of functional languages, and especially ocaml. Vijay BTW, I dont know if this is the right place for this, but are there any people interested in ocaml programming out here in the San Francisco area? Or alternatively, if there are people on this list skilled in ocaml and interested in some sort of remote contract programming arrangement, please send me email. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Arturo Borquez" To: Cc: Sent: Friday, March 23, 2001 7:17 PM Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Why People Aren't Using OCAML? (was Haskell) > On Fri, 23 March 2001, "Mattias Waldau" wrote: > > > > > Something we should think about also for Ocaml > > > > http://www.jelovic.com/articles/why_people_arent_using_haskell.htm > > > > "What can be done about this? First and foremost the Haskell community must > > make a standard distribution of Haskell that contains enough libraries to be > > useful. That should include a regular expression library, an Internet > > protocol library, a library for dealing with standard internet data and > > encoding, a crypto library, a multimedia library and a GUI library. > > > > Next, the Haskell community must step out of its research circles and start > > publicizing Haskell to the practicing programmers. Write articles in DDJ and > > similar publications. Publish real-world programs written in Haskell." > > > > Most of this is also relevant for Ocaml, for example there are > > crypto libraries and XML-support (for example PXP, which require wlex, which > > is a hazzle). > > > Hi Mattias: > As I am part of the 'real world programmers' from the begining I have being trying to put OCaml to work in trivial but 'real world apps' with great success. I must recognize that I am not so skilled in the language to participate in the theoric-forum, but yet I have coded some apps (server services) to my company to show the reliability of OCaml, and we are all agree that is a great language. But a great language to be successful and honour the great effort done by the authors must be promoted actively outside the research environment. I believe that lots of programmers not use OCaml because they are unaware about its existence. How to do it? The strategy and decision is to be made by INRIA and/or Caml Consortuim. Personaly I would like to see OCaml world wide spreaded playing in the 'great leages'. > > > Find the best deals on the web at AltaVista Shopping! > http://www.shopping.altavista.com > ------------------- > To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr. Archives: http://caml.inria.fr ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr. Archives: http://caml.inria.fr