Re: [Caml-list] how to encourage adoption of OCaml?

[Roberto Di Cosmo <roberto@dicosmo.org>]

Hi Duane,
   thanks for your message: I found it is a very interesting outsider's point of view.

I would just like to remark that what you point out is more along an "image"
dimension, than a "substance" one.

The world is full of exciting "modern" programming languages that change syntax
and semantics every couple of months, or that force you to write zillions of
"modern" unit tests just to make sure you did not mix integers with strings,
while in the ML (and OCaml world) we just keep writing safe and elegant code
since the 1980's.

If you scratch a bit the surface, it's easy to see that a lof of the "new"
exciting technology around is actually "has been", while the "old" technology
underlying OCaml is actually "revolutionary".

If you share this point of view, please come along and lend a hand, help
us become more fashionable, and help OCaml get an "image" that better
correspond to its great "substance"

Cheers

--
Roberto

P.S.: by the way, it's inria.fr, not infria.fr, or, in old technology
      terms, s/infria/inria/g :-)

On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 09:16:09AM -0600, Duane Johnson wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 8:40 AM, Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>     Adoption is interesting but, as Tony Hoare put it, we are not fashion
>     designers. The best thing I can think of is to communicate more and better,
>     talk about the cool world that is being done in the OCaml communities, and
>     importantly talking about it outside it. Supporting software projects that
>     have a potential for impact outside the OCaml community is also key -- Coq,
>     MLdonkey, Coccinelle, Flow, the SLAM static verifier toolkit, just to name
>     a few.
> 
> 
> 
> As someone who just signed up to this mailing list, may I offer some
> observations?
> 
> - my first impression of OCaml community was through reddit.com/r/ocaml. As a
> reddit user, I would rank /r/ocaml as "barely alive but stable"--in other
> words, the upvotes-per-thread there are in the single digits and low
> double-digits showing people exist there, but it is not a thriving community.
> - next, I tried to find a google group. It was hard to find any substantial and
> popular OCaml groups there. There was an OCaml aggregation list, but it wasn't
> clear that it was a discussion group. My first thought was, Is there no mailing
> list? I searched around and found the infria.fr domain. To an outsider, this
> lends no credibility or brand-name familiarity. Not only is the web domain
> unfamiliar, but the website does not look welcoming--it appears to be out of
> the 90s.
> - signing up for a mailing list is slow and unrewarding. I'd much rather sign
> up for a more modern community technology like reddit, facebook, slack, or
> google groups.
> - I clicked "Info" to get more info about the mailing list on infria.fr and it
> says "Private information" inside a white bubble. Ok...
> - I looked for a chat community, and IRC is the only option. This signals "old
> tech community" to me. Slack or gitter.im is a more inclusive, modern
> community. In order to participate in IRC, one must always be connected. This
> makes it more difficult for outsiders to come in and feel like they can 'catch
> up' on the conversation (Yes, I know there are chat logs, but this feature is
> not an integrated part of IRC).
> 
> In summary, all of the signals that I usually depend on to evaluate the
> community around a technology are either weak or give me the impression of "old
> and barely stable". New, exciting technologies that I've seen tend to embrace
> and tap in to existing community platforms (slack, reddit, github, gitbook,
> google groups) in order to leverage the platform and amplify their advertising
> signal.
> 
> Duane Johnson
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 8:40 AM, Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>     > Do others on this list feel the ramp to OCaml adoption is smoother than
>     my impression suggests?
> 
>     I can't speak for "adoption", but I think that you have been very kind as
>     far as user experience is concerned, that it is probably worse than you
>     suggest.
> 
>     We discussed some of these issues a few month ago in a thread launched by
>     Hendrik Bloom:
> 
>       Is OCaml for experienced beginners?
>       Hendrik Bloom, December 2015
>       https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2015-12/msg00077.html
> 
>     I gave a few remarks on the evolution of the OCaml ecosystem on the period
>     I know of that you may be interested in:
>       https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2015-12/msg00110.html
> 
>     I think "adoption" and "usability" are interlinked but separate issues.
> 
>     Getting adoption distributes the number of people interesting in helping on
>     usability, so it tends to improve usability, but I tend to think that the
>     second is actually the more interesting, important goal to aim at.
> 
>     Adoption is interesting but, as Tony Hoare put it, we are not fashion
>     designers. The best thing I can think of is to communicate more and better,
>     talk about the cool world that is being done in the OCaml communities, and
>     importantly talking about it outside it. Supporting software projects that
>     have a potential for impact outside the OCaml community is also key -- Coq,
>     MLdonkey, Coccinelle, Flow, the SLAM static verifier toolkit, just to name
>     a few.
> 
>     Regarding usability, I think the tooling ecosystem is too complex today. If
>     I wanted to bootstrap a beginner to do stuff I would have to tell them
>     about the OCaml compiler tools (ocamlc, ocamlopt), ocamlfind, a build
>     system (omake or ocamlbuild for example), oasis, Merlin, opam, and get them
>     to learn either Vim or Emacs. That's a bit too much and even with the
>     plethora of tools there are problems we haven't really solved yet -- for
>     example, how to avoid module name conflicts.
>     I think a lot more work is required, both incremental improvements and a
>     few grand redesigns, before we reach a comfortable ecosystem where starting
>     an OCaml project feels like a breeze. That's what I would aim at.
> 
> 
>         Who here is excited about making OCaml approachable to newcomers? Where
>         is the main ongoing work on this? Who are the main leaders from this
>         perspective?
> 
> 
>     This is an interesting question. To my knowledge, no one is specifically
>     focused on this mightily important question. But it's fair to assume that
>     we have no "usability team" today, it's more a distributed collection of
>     efforts going in all directions from various people, for example:
> 
>     - Gerd Stolpmann did a lot of work on the early language tooling, notably
>     GODI (an earlier ocaml-specific package manager) and ocamlfind, and also
>     kept very high documentation standards that are an example to follow.
> 
>     - Sylvain le Gall's work on OASIS helps a lot of developers do their
>     packaging by encapsulating, in particular, the knowledge of what to install
>     where (not a simple question).
> 
>     - The OPAM team as a whole, as well as the maintainers of the public opam
>     repository, have done tremendous work making OCaml software easy to install
>     and deploy. (Windows is still of a sore point, but there is progress in
>     that area. It's a distinct possibility that the OCaml ecosystem will become
>     nice to use on Windows before Windows disappears or gets a real Unix
>     userland.)
> 
>     I would personally be interested in helping someone with a holistic
>     approach to usability devote as much of their time as they can. (I think
>     there are some sources of funding that could be considered, but nothing
>     very certain; from a crowd-funding perspective I would be glad to pay €30
>     a month to fund such a position.) I think this is a difficult position
>     because there is a lot of thankless grunt work implied, and arguably it's
>     not a very career-advancing move.
> 
>     On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 8:57 AM, Dean Thompson <deansherthompson@gmail.com>
>     wrote:
> 
>         Thank you, everyone, for the responses and discussion. If there is
>         interest, I would still love to hear more thoughts about whether there
>         is a roadmap (either de facto from the community, or explicit from
>         leaders of the community) to foster broader adoption.
> 
>         I see that many organizations are making immense contributions to the
>         community: from language and ecosystem enhancements, to Real World
>         OCaml, to the OCaml Users and Developers Workshop. Technical progress
>         is rapid. But so far, to me, these wonderful contributions feel more
>         like giving back to the community for us to make what we can of them,
>         rather than anyone’s systematic effort to streamline broader uptake of
>         OCaml.
> 
>         These are the impressions of a newcomer. If there is interest, I would
>         love to hear more seasoned viewpoints.
>        
>         Dean
>        
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>         --
>         Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>         https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>         Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>         Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Roberto Di Cosmo
 
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