Re: [Caml-list] OCaml maintenance status / community fork

[oliver <oliver@first.in-berlin.de>]

Hello,


during the last years, more than one person mourned about
this or that dark sides of OCaml.

Even some of the mourning and the proposals had mentioned good ideas and had
positive motivation, after a while it became clear, that the same people with
the one or the other good idea, failed badly in other areas. Good, that they
did not have had too much influence in the development of OCaml.

Even in general I like the community/bazaar, I think in case of OCaml,
there is a lot of high knowledge in the core team, which was criticized
by others already, but in the long run, it turned out that the core team
had their reasons for a lot of decisions, which were criticized.
Ocaml of course will also have some history-related issues that might be
changed, but maybe also a lot of decisions inside, which relies on theoretical
reasoning.

So I'm sceptical here again.

There is a lot of software around, where even beginners could change it to the
better.

But regarding OCaml, I think even for advanced programmers, it might be easy
to change it to the worse.

Of course (nearly) nobody of the people on this list would admit that,
but let's wait a while, and it maybe will show again, as it did before. ;-)


Instead of general mourning, I think discussing on certain
topics would make more sense.

But this also was done already and often.


Maybe I misunderstood the original intention of the thread starter,
but that are just my opinions here.

It's often assumed, that anything that is driven by the community / bazaar
can flourish and anything driven by the "cathedral" is starving to death.

Not sure if this is true.

Isn't it a general problem of functional languages to have a small
user base?

What are the OCaml-forks doing?
Are they flourishing?
Do they make functional programming more popular?

Or is it just a minor change?


Functional languages are minority languages.
And forks of such languages... are they really hype?

It seems to me, that rather imperative languages pick up functional features,
and become more popular through this kind of process.

So... what happens if the minority splits again and again?

Can a community of a hand full of users/hackers flourish more
than a couple of hands of such people?

Will Ocaml and other functional languages become more popular by
splitting the user base into even smaller parts?

Will such projects live long (enough)?

I have some reasonable doubts here.


Ciao,
   Oliver