From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr (mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.82]) by walapai.inria.fr (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id pBALEgwU027356 for ; Sat, 10 Dec 2011 22:14:42 +0100 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: Ag0FADvL404+3JIEgWdsb2JhbABDp3mBXIEpIgEBFiYlgXIBAQQBJxM1CgULCxgcEhQYMYgbAga0QosKYwSUcJIp X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.71,332,1320620400"; d="scan'208";a="134855878" Received: from vs.philou.ch ([62.220.146.4]) by mail1-smtp-roc.national.inria.fr with ESMTP; 10 Dec 2011 22:14:37 +0100 Received: by vs.philou.ch (Postfix, from userid 1000) id BD90769C5E8; Sat, 10 Dec 2011 22:14:36 +0100 (CET) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 22:14:36 +0100 From: Philippe Strauss To: Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons Cc: Gabriel Scherer , caml-list Message-ID: <20111210211436.GA17859@vs.philou.ch> References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14) Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Why isn't there a common platform for functional language interaction ? On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 09:44:01PM +0100, Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons wrote: > > What I see as the very first issue is the spread of the efforts between > similar yet incompatible ML dialects leading to 4 weak communities (SML, > OCaml, F#, Haskell) instead of a really strong one and all the related > problems that come with it (fewer books, risk for industrials, work > duplication, inefficient funding, lack of visibility, etc). > > Example : there is an excellent whole source code optimiser ... for SML. > And an award winning SMT solver ... in Caml developed in a company that > invests heavily in information-centric web applications ... in F# ( > http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/z3/ if you don't > know Nikolaj Bjorner's Z3). Now say you want to do an application that > delivers optimal electricity production plans. What language do you choose ? Sure but is there any effort not based on free will limitation which would works ? Marketing, an attractive website, an packaging/oasis-db like thing, good introductory tutorials (I've appreciated the chapter1 of jon harrop, btw), a distro maybe based on batteries or ... argh. Each piece of software, libraries, exist becaus of a reserch project, someone choosing ocaml as the tool of choice, or spare-time and leisure. This diversity is the consequence of free will. sometimes it's waste of resources, but try to join each resources by email and convince them to unify their efforts. Or give them compensation for it. Joining together jane-street core and batteries, you can already forget about it, so joining ML/Haskell/OCaml/F# efforts together... And people getting away from for example c-- or llvm based lower level stuff, there's always an explanation of lower "energy" like barrier to get a thing done, writing your own stuff rather than diving and get drown in a monster, etc... that's open source devel. > Just being able to reuse the source-code between string ML dialects even > after recompilation (X -> CoreML -> specific platform) would be an > improvement. -- Philippe Strauss av. de Beaulieu 25 1004 Lausanne http://www.philou.ch