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 WAA18988; Tue, 16 Jul 2002 22:11:28 +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 WAA19019 for ; Tue, 16 Jul 2002 22:11:27 +0200 (MET DST) X-SPAM-Warning: Sending machine is listed in blackholes.five-ten-sg.com Received: from btclick.com (mta03.btfusion.com [62.172.195.12]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id g6GKBRT21908 for ; Tue, 16 Jul 2002 22:11:27 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from 7p8420j ([217.34.38.22]) by btclick.com (Netscape Messaging Server 4.15) with SMTP id GZCYR102.HBH; Tue, 16 Jul 2002 21:11:25 +0100 Message-Id: <4.1.20020716210318.00a615e0@pop3.btclick.com> X-Sender: daveb/pophost.tardis.ed.ac.uk@127.0.0.1 X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1 Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 21:14:49 +0100 To: Markus Mottl , Dave Berry From: Dave Berry Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Re: productivity improvement Cc: Oleg , OCaml In-Reply-To: <20020714221328.GB18194@fichte.ai.univie.ac.at> References: <4.1.20020714213245.00a37f00@pop3.btclick.com> <200207121133.HAA26986@dewberry.cc.columbia.edu> <200207081952.PAA28813@hickory.cc.columbia.edu> <200207121035.GAA26600@dewberry.cc.columbia.edu> <20020712112304.GC684@fichte.ai.univie.ac.at> <200207121133.HAA26986@dewberry.cc.columbia.edu> <4.1.20020714213245.00a37f00@pop3.btclick.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk At 00:13 15/07/2002, Markus Mottl wrote: >Erlang is very niche-specific (though, fault-tolerant distributed >computation is surely a worthy niche). I think that Erlang would find >it tough to compete against OCaml in most other niches That Erlang is niche-specific is exactly my point -- it's a niche that is ripe for major productivity improvements, and I can believe a factor of 10:1 for Erlang over traditional languages within that niche. Other niches are less likely to show such gains, IMO -- even theorem provers and compilers. A gain of 10:1 means that you could write in 5 weeks using OCaml what it would take you a year to write in C. I've used SML and C/C++ to write compilers, and I didn't see anything like that sort of improvement. Even if OCaml is more productive than SML, it still seems unlikely to me to reach a 10:1 improvement, at least for most people. I really think you should be careful when trumpeting productivity improvements. People have seen a lot of hype for various technologies, and are understandably sceptical. It's best if you can produce actual figures (this is hard, of course). >Visual Basic lives from a wealth of tailor-made libraries and development >tools for such applications. This is "application development" rather >than "programming". It's difficult to estimate productivity gains by >language features as long as libraries/tools do most of the job. You'd >have to be specific about what you actually want to measure. I don't think it's worthwhile to distinguish between "languages", "libraries" and "tools", when considering productivity. >Anyway, I'd be really surprised if my average productivity gain using >OCaml over Java on arbitrary projects were only 2:1. I am pretty sure >it would be higher than this. Doubling the factor seems quite realistic >to me. OK, I'll take that on board. Dave. ------------------- 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