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

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

Hello,


On Tue, Dec 06, 2011 at 11:35:55AM +0100, Gabriel Scherer wrote:
[...]
> Having a personal blog is not the only way to help disseminate
> information about OCaml. If you participate to news-aggregation sites
> such as Slashdot, Reddit or whatever, you should consider submitting
> OCaml-related content that could be of interest to the target
> audience, or participating in relevant discussions when appropriate.
> "Appropriate" is the key word here : quality should be favored over
> quantity, and I personally try not to get involved in negative
> discussions (in particular language flamewars: informed users of other
> programming languages are not enemies, even if they are frustratingly
> better at propaganda, have a nicer surface syntax, and indulge
> themselves into letting people think that "pure" necessarily means
> "better", hint hint :-). The OCaml community should have a public face
> to be proud of; it is currently gradually moving out of total silence.
[...]


It's not easy to talk about Ocaml, if you not already have used it...
...and understood, what's different there, and why it's, as it is.

It's very similar to explaining a user of "office software" the
advantages of LaTeX.

But with Ocaml it's even more complicated, because some terms
(like "reference" or "abstract data type") are also used in other
languages... but these terms have a different meaning there.

So, when you try to explain the certain properties of OCaml,
people put it into the same box that they use for their own language,
even it's completely different stuff.

I'm really tired of long language flamewars, and so I better
enjoy using OCaml in my (personal) projects (because
t work it's very unlikely that I can use it), than trying to convince
others of OCaml.

This seems to be different here for the people on the list...?!


And if I nevertheless fall back into old convincing-behaviour,
most often I fail.

So if I'm such a bad person in PR / "evangelisation" / Ocaml-propaganda,
I better let other people do the work, who can do it much better.

And one way to explain the advantages of OCaml (as compared to java for example),
is this article from Yaron Minsky:

  Why the next language you learn should be functional
  Yaron Minsky, Jane Street
    http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2038036


Of course this can't convince people who are fixed at their non-OCaml language,
but from at least two people (with some mathematical and programming background,
who are not OCaml-programmers) I got very positive feedback ofr that article.

So, instead of never ending language flamewars, I think, such good and clear articles
like that, mentioned above, would make more sense.

BTW I  also have to mourn about that article: instead of
  "Why the next language you learn should be functional"
the tile should have been better
  "Why the next language you learn should be OCaml" :-)


Ciao,
   Oliver