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 LAA13865; Fri, 8 Jun 2001 11:41:06 +0200 (MET DST) 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 LAA14282 for ; Fri, 8 Jun 2001 11:41:05 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from ip208.usw4.rb1.pdx.nwlink.com (ip208.usw4.rb1.pdx.nwlink.com [209.20.133.208]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with SMTP id f589f4L14687 for ; Fri, 8 Jun 2001 11:41:04 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (qmail 13761 invoked by uid 500); 8 Jun 2001 09:41:02 -0000 Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 02:41:02 -0700 From: leary@nwlink.com To: Jonathan Coupe Cc: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: [Caml-list] ocaml complexity Message-ID: <20010608024102.A13672@jean> References: <20010607015821.B11344@jean> <002c01c0ef7f$e154f3e0$5d26883e@baby> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <002c01c0ef7f$e154f3e0$5d26883e@baby>; from jonathan@meanwhile.freeserve.co.uk on Thu, Jun 07, 2001 at 07:29:27PM +0100 Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk On Thu, Jun 07, 2001 at 07:29:27PM +0100, Jonathan Coupe wrote: > 1. Perl was perceived by the adopters who gave it critical mass as being > fundamentally like the languages they already knew (bash, C, Awk) It was a > low risk, low effort, low fear choice. A Hitchhiker's Guide to type theory (and all the other alien things my eyes glaze over at on this list) aimed at the unwashed masses would go a long way to making OCaml (and functional programming in general) more accessible. Did I pass over one somewhere? > 2. Perl is aimed most of all at small projects. The risk of trying new tools > in this space is low - throwing away a 200 lines of code is annoying, but > not job threatening. And benefits are quickly perceiveable. Ocaml's best use > is probably larger projects beyond the scope of scripting languages. > Throwing a way an even quarter completed project is likely to mean the loss > of several thousand lines of coding effort, and you're unlikely to have > proveable benefits until the end of the first project, which is more likely > to be months, not days or hours, after starting work. How much time and money do development teams spend creating and tracking down memory management errors in C and C++ starting on day one? At least some of the benefits are immediate and ongoing. > > 3. Perl's regexp gave it a decisive edge in several rapidly expanding > niches. And OCaml has features which give it a decisive edge in markets too big to be called mere niches. > 4. Its easy to perceive Perl's strengths from an initial examination, and > perhaps harder to pick up on its weaknesses. I can say exactly the same of OCaml. ------------------- 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