From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id PAA07416; Thu, 20 Jun 2002 15:08:13 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id PAA07614 for ; Thu, 20 Jun 2002 15:08:12 +0200 (MET DST) X-SPAM-Warning: Sending machine is listed in blackholes.five-ten-sg.com Received: from athlon.baretta.com (r-mi214-6a51.tin.it [62.211.4.51]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id g5KD89H22991; Thu, 20 Jun 2002 15:08:09 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from baretta.com (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]) by athlon.baretta.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6A17B27246; Thu, 20 Jun 2002 15:14:01 +0200 (CEST) Message-ID: <3D11D519.2050906@baretta.com> Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 15:14:01 +0200 From: Alessandro Baretta Organization: Baretta srl -- www.baretta.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020529 X-Accept-Language: it, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Xavier Leroy Cc: Ocaml Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Unix.file_descr -> int ??? References: <3D0F37E6.6000307@baretta.com> <000101c21705$d9f23640$0501a8c0@lexifi01> <3D0FB722.6000009@baretta.com> <20020620132333.B2180@pauillac.inria.fr> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk Xavier Leroy wrote: > What's so surprising about this? This man chose a particular line of > business where customers are not interested in new or advanced stuff. > Just like you could choose to manage a McDonald's and have no > professional interest in gourmet food or fine wines. It is not so much his choice as the choice of his customers, which, of course, he must adhere to. If his customers ask for MS-SQLserver he gives them that, although he openly declares to have a preference for DB2. The same is with PLs. He mentioned a "fantastic" programming languange by the name of APL which he used to use when he was a researcher at IBM. (I'm sure you know about APL much better than I.) It is not without melancholy, he said, that has had to move towards more commercial systems, mainly Java, and more recently, given the massive marketing effort from Microsoft, towards .NET. What I'm talking about is the scarce interest customers have for quality software development processes, which necessarily include quality programming languages, as opposed to caring about the marketing hype behind one platform or another. Have you seen the MS commercial where a robot begins to paint a car frame as soon as the customer declares his preference for that color, stops when the customer shows some indecision, and immediately resumes as the client confirms his first choice? Has this got anything at all to do with .NET? It's just the same thing with teenagers and MacDonalds: is it good for their health to eat there? Definitely not. An education effort must be carried out with teenagers to teach them to eat pizza, which is good for them ;-) as opposed to hamburgers. (And, BTW, yes, I am Italian.) A similar education effort might make corporate customers aware of the fact that O'Caml is good for them, while MS is not. (And, yes, I'm also a Caml rider and Penguin breeder.) > I'm not disturbed in the least by the fact that many computer > professionals couldn't care less about what we do. (And conversely :-) > What I am concerned about is the well-meaning suggestions that we > should move towards "their" technologies in the vague hope that they > will pay more attention then. They won't. I don't mean to say that "we" (the Ocaml team at INRIA, really) should bow to the omnipotence of Big Bill, especially when the language needs special features in its VM in order to work, as you mention later on. Yet, it would be easier for me to market O'Caml applications if I could mention some commercial trademarks my customers have already heard. "O'Caml" is not a winner for a trademark, especially when you are confronted by the inevitable question: "What does it stand for?" >>They want *real_world* products on >>*real_world* platforms: COBOL and .NET, that's what they want." >>No comment. But if Ocaml could somehow "run on .NET", people >>like the above CEO (an ex-mathematician and IBM researcher, >>by the way) would be a whole lot more interested in Ocaml. > > > Again, I think this is a fallacy. By the same logic: > > "if OCaml could somehow 'look like COBOL', people like the above CEO > would be a lot more interested in OCaml". > > "if Bordeaux red wines were carbonated, McDonald's would be a lot more > interested in selling them". > > You can make your own parallels: it's fun :-) I don't think O'Caml should like like anything other than O'Caml, with the sole exception of DdR's CamlP4 and its revised syntax. The customers has no visibility of the language itself, but of the entire platform on which the software runs: VM, API and libraries. I don't know a lot about VMs, but I can definitely say the Caml VM is a whole lot faster and more efficient that Sun's JVM. I had to buy a new PC one year ago just to write--and run--a few thousand lines of Java. O'Caml work, on the other hand, requires no costly hardware. I really like the VM. But all this does not make it terribly attractive to my customers. As I already mentioned, it is mainly a marketing problem. >>Xavier, let me ask a dumb question, if you don't mind: how >>do you choose which processor architectures to port ocamlopt >>to? > > > By a combination of demand and availability (of a machine running said > architecture). > > >>Could .NET simply be regarded as a new "architecture" for ocamlopt? > > > Not at all. .NET isn't just a (virtual) machine instruction set: it's > a whole infrastructure, including memory management, data > representation formats, systems services, libraries, etc. All these > replace (and conflict with) those we have in the OCaml implementation. > > Our past experiments in retargeting the OCaml implementation to .Net > failed because of this. For more details, and an explanation of why > .Net is a real straight-jacket for innovative programming languages, > see a previous post of mine: > http://caml.inria.fr/archives/200102/msg00190.html Dumb question. Alright, forget it. Thank you very much for your time and interest. I hope I am making some sense. Alex ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners