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

[Mohamed Iguernlala <iguer.auto@gmail.com>]

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Hi there,

I guess you found inria.fr and not infria.fr :-). If it's the case, the 
first thing you should notice when visiting it is the message:

"This site is updated infrequently. For up-to-date information, please 
visit the new OCaml website at ocaml.org <http://ocaml.org>."

and on ocaml.org, you'll find a "modern website" with a "more 
conventional" extension. One click later (on the Community
item of the upper menu), you'll get the information you need about 
mailing lists.

Regards,

- Mohamed.


Le 08/07/2016 17:16, Duane Johnson a écrit :
>
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 8:40 AM, Gabriel Scherer 
> <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com <mailto: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 <http://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 <http://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 <http://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 
> <http://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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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
>
>
>
>
>
>
>         --
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>
>
>


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