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 PAA17740; Tue, 11 Mar 2003 15:27:27 +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 PAA17736 for ; Tue, 11 Mar 2003 15:27:26 +0100 (MET) Received: from draco.services.brown.edu (draco.services.brown.edu [128.148.19.208]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id h2BERPX10224 for ; Tue, 11 Mar 2003 15:27:25 +0100 (MET) Received: from localhost.localdomain (anquetil.cs.brown.edu [128.148.33.148]) by draco.services.brown.edu (Switch-2.2.5/Switch-2.2.4) with ESMTP id h2BERNG02747 for ; Tue, 11 Mar 2003 09:27:23 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: [Caml-list] OCaml popularity From: Guillaume Marceau To: caml-list@inria.fr In-Reply-To: <200303111023.LAA09578@pauillac.inria.fr> References: <200303111023.LAA09578@pauillac.inria.fr> Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.0.5 Date: 11 Mar 2003 09:27:18 -0500 Message-Id: <1047392843.16158.2192.camel@anquetil> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Brown-MailScanner: Found to be clean X-Spam: no; 0.00; guillaume:01 caml-list:01 gerd:01 stolpmann:01 python:01 pierre:01 weis:01 recognized:99 ocaml's:01 laden:99 strive:99 offsets:01 matured:01 coders:01 usages:01 Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk On Mon, 2003-03-10 at 18:48, Gerd Stolpmann wrote: > > I suppose it has to do with the label "functional language", and > these languages are often seen as toys of academic people. I.e. > nothing for the real programmer. Not really sexy. What about Python and Ruby? They were both heavily influenced by functional programming, yet they do not appear to carry the "toy functional language" stigma. Is Ocaml special in that respect? On Tue, 2003-03-11 at 05:23, Pierre Weis wrote: > [...] > > To briefly answer your question: I think Caml is not so popular > because there were no big company or extremely important and > successful tool to advertize it all over the place (like Sun did for > Java or Unix for C). In short, Caml is more and more recognized as a > powerful and well-crafted language among expert programmers, but it is > almost unknown to the general audience. > Well, since we cannot do much about Ocaml's lack of buzz-word laden marketing campaign, maybe we should look at other indicator of language success and work of those. I believe most of today's mainstream language kick started their popularity with a killer app : C was once the only language you could hack Unix with Java had web applets Perl had regular expressions Visual Basic had that really nice beginner-friendly dialog box editor PHP does server side web page generation. Tcl had Tk We could strive to find (or develop) something ocaml can do that cannot be done with any other mainstream language. Or, alternatively, something that is an order or two faster in ocaml than in any other language. So easy in fact, that the time time saved on a single project offsets the time cost of learning the rudiments ocaml [*]. While writing these lines reminds me of Todd Proebsting's presentation at LL2. http://ll2.ai.mit.edu/talks/proebsting.ppt Among other things, he offered a starter list of domains which are begging for better support at the programming language level. If only we could nail one of them solid... One other unrelated observation on language acceptance: In the the industry, they accept new languages as their IDE become usable. Somehow, a solid IDE has become the sign that the language matured and is now stable enough for industrial usage. Also, by their own account, industrial coders spent so much time in VC++, they are now IDE-dependent. IDE in this context means one-key compilation, hypertext jumps between name usages and definitions, and a tree overview of the components of the project, context sensitive work completion and context sensitive help, etc. Ocaml would gain at having an official IDE project which implement these features. [*] : Ocaml makes writing compilers a delicacy. Unfortunately, not enough people write compilers to start a critical mass seed around it. For now I am selling ocaml as the language of choice to do error prone data structure gymnastics. This is rather vague and unlikely to trigger at coder into thinking : "wow, I'm about to do error prone data structure gymnastics! This is the perfect occasion to learn ocaml!" -- "In Google non est, ergo non est." - Guillaume ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners