Re: [Caml-list] ocaml complexity

["Jonathan Coupe" <jonathan@meanwhile.freeserve.co.uk>]

----- Original Message -----
> No one factor is decisive, of course, else people would be using OCaml
> (more) already.  But it looks like you're saying that adoption is governed
> by people who can't be convinced to adopt unless they've shipped something
> using the untried technology.

No. What I said was that you won't convice sceptical colleagues that you're
right in choosing ocaml until you ship. Until then, you're burning up
political capital and your job/VC/Project is at risk - much more so than if
you're using a mainstream technology like C or C++. You certainly won't
convince anyone that ocaml was the right choice by saying that you're
developing faster "from day one" as you claimed. People make claims that all
the time. They're usually wrong. In fact, making claims like will reduce
crdibility - unless you've got unusually tight metrics to back you're claim
up. From your comments, I'm pretty sure you've never been a lead on a
commercial project.

The point here isn't to give up on promoting Ocaml. It's to do it in a smart
way - by understanding the barriers to adoption of the language

> I went to the GNU Smalltalk site -- where a lot of people are going to go
> first, if they're curious.  No good tutorials that I could see, the manual
> looked pretty unfriendly -- what I got a chance to see of it.  The html
> manual is on an ftp server that allows 10 users, so people might not be
> able to read up on it enough to want to download.  I wasn't.  There's also
> no evidence of *why* I should want to learn and use Smalltalk.  And
anyway,
> I'm not a big fan of using OOP (and certainly not for everything), as many
> people aren't.  OCaml doesn't seem to force it on the user.  That's a
> selling point.

Hmm. No one I've ever met uses GnuSmalltalk. My understanding from people
who have tried is that its only marginall usable. The standard open source
smalltalk is Squeak. Ruby, a Smalltalk cousin, is probably alos worth
looking at  - and is spreading like wildfire. You can find more Smalltalk
stuff at www.stic.org

Jonathan

-------------------
Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs  FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/
To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr  Archives: http://caml.inria.fr