Re: [Caml-list] general question, was Re: OCaml is broken

[Jacques Carette <carette@mcmaster.ca>]

I agree with most of what Dario Teixeira wrote, except for one small 
quibble:

Dario Teixeira wrote:
> Last but not least, Ocaml plays a central role in multiple INRIA
> projects, which means its creators have all the reason to continue
> maintaining it and improving it for the foreseeable future (and there's
> some interesting goodies in the upcoming 3.12 release, for example).
>   
Actually, this gives these projects an incentive to insure that Ocaml 
survives, which gives an incentive for some 'maintenance engineers' to 
be kept on-staff to insure that Ocaml does not bit-rot.  This gives only 
quite partial incentive to a team of researchers (the creators of Ocaml) 
to do maintenance (as that is usually not research, thus not the kind of 
work of interest to researchers).  And entropy is a real problem -- 
Ocaml is now quite mature, which means that radical changes are well 
nigh impossible; this is a serious disincentive for researchers.  End of 
quibble.

Personally, I would really really want to see a 4.00 release which 
really warrants that name.  The 3.XX line can be maintained for a few 
more years while people switch, in the same way gcc did this. 

In any case, I have nevertheless voted with my time and effort: I have 1 
large project being implemented in Ocaml, 3 medium ones in metaocaml, 
although I must admit that I have some 'research' code in Haskell (and 
in Maple, but that's another story).

Jacques