Re: [Caml-list] OCaml growing pains

[Mikhail Fedotov <mikhail@kittown.com>]

Hi,

Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

>Xavier Leroy wrote:
>  
>
>>Some of your recent Usenet
>>postings left me shaking my head in disbelief, not knowing whether to
>>laugh or cry.
>>    
>>
>
>I was going to reply privately, taking this comment of yours in stride.
>I was composing my reply inline, dealing with some industrial growth
>issues.  When I got farther down in your post, I realized how nasty your
>response actually was, and how disinterested you are in some things I'm
>interested in.  I don't take public nastiness sitting down, so here's my
>reply.
>
>  
>
Good points below, but it seems you are loosing a major one: you *never* 
can promote/advance
the langauge while going *against* its authors. (You can fork if of 
course, but then you'll be on
your own.)

When you are going against authors and mainters of some tool, it takes 
time. Your time. Their time.
The net result is the flame; good ideas are usually expressed in the 
beginning of discussion but
rarely developed any further.

That's one bad side, but there is another one which is even worse. While 
spending all time on
sorting out offences and stuff, you are not only loosing any chance to 
do anything good, but you
even do not know if you are actually able to help (read: develop trivial 
ideas like "community
should grow" into something implementable and implement them *without* 
going against tool
authors and maintainers, choose proper style and attitude for messages 
in *tech* list etc).

In addition, when all feedback from major players that you are receiving 
is negative, it means
that you are going in the wrong direction and for some reason fail to 
change it into the right one.

The net result may be that you become an expert at offences (and 
excuses) but can not do
anything when you have noone to battle with (i.e. when the real work 
starts). Been there myself,
lost a lot of time.

>- people visit Seattle from other cities and move there
>- people need motives to come to meetings, i.e. location, parking, beer
>- establishing critical mass in tech hubs is important to language
>growth
>- when other cities finally want to do it, they know who to contact
>- repetition is the key to all learning
>- announces every 3 weeks aren't anything out of anyone's life
>- those that don't care can skip it upon reading the subject line
>
>This is called getting things done.  Where's your index of local user
>groups?  Where are the announces?  There is nothing at
>http://caml.inria.fr at all.  What transmission vehicle if not
>caml-list?
>
>  
>

The most obvious is http://www.ocaml.org - it does not seem to be 
maintened anymore ( no mention
of 3.08 release), so *maybe* you have the chance to become the 
maintainer if you ask the
right people. Then you'll be able to show that you can do. :)

>// return an array of 100 packed tuples, just in case
>temps
>  int $[tvar0][2*100]; // what the c function needs
>  value $[tvar1]; // one int
>  value $[tvar2]; // one tuple
>  int $[tvar3] // loop control var
>oncePre
>eachPre
>  $[cvar0]=&($[tvar0][0]);
>eachPost
>  $[lvar0] = alloc(2*100, 0 /*NB: zero-tagged block*/ );
>  for(int $[tvar3]=0;$[tvar3]<100;$[tvar3]++) {
>    $[tvar2] = alloc_tuple(2);
>    $[tvar1] = Val_int($[cvar0][0+2*$[tvar3]]);
>    Store_field($[tvar2],0,$[tvar1]);
>    $[tvar1] = Val_int($[cvar0][1]);
>    Store_field($[tvar2],1,$[tvar1+2*$[tvar3]]);
>    Array_store($[lvar0],$[tvar3],$[tvar0]);
>  }
>oncePost
>  
>

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