Re: [Caml-list] Re: productivity improvement

[Markus Mottl <markus@oefai.at>]

On Fri, 12 Jul 2002, Oleg wrote:
> Looking at Halo [1] credits, one can see that it was developed by about 10 
> programmers (there were also testers and artists involved). A single O'Caml 
> programmer capable of developing such a game alone should certainly stand to 
> make tons of money. Then why don't we see much software written in O'Caml?

Easy: almost all commercial and most academic programmers have never
heard of OCaml. That's a fact.

> I'm not buying the argument that "O'Caml isn't used in the industry
> because investors and project managers are stupid".

Nobody has ever said so. They are at least uninformed what concerns
this language. And even if they are informed, there are many commercial
reasons why OCaml might be a sub-optimal choice: lack of programmers,
lack of libraries for commercial purposes, etc. This is not just a matter
of language features.

> You don't need a project manager if you can replace a team of 100 C/C++
> programmers alone (or just 10 of them if you work in your spare time <
> 1 hour a day) [2]

Another reason why project managers don't want OCaml :-)

Now seriously, I don't quite get your argument. Do you have any
imagination, how difficult it is to find OCaml-programmers? I can tell
you of maybe three somewhat competent OCaml-programmers in my country.
Other programmers here are not incompetent in the sense that they don't
know how to program in general but in the sense that they have never used
(most often not even heard) of this language. If I founded a company
here using this technology, I'd get into very serious troubles when my
main programmer gets a brick on his head. Just too risky!

Regards,
Markus Mottl

-- 
Markus Mottl                                             markus@oefai.at
Austrian Research Institute
for Artificial Intelligence                  http://www.oefai.at/~markus
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