Re: [Caml-list] [Was: OCamlJit 2.0]

[Benedikt Meurer <benedikt.meurer@googlemail.com>]

On Nov 20, 2010, at 17:10 , Yoann Padioleau wrote:

>> It's probably not a technical decision, but more likely a marketing decision. If you tell Joe
> 
> Who is Joe ? A developer ? A user ? A venture capitalist ?

Joe is 99.9% of world's population, excluding experts in this special area.

>> that your webservices run on Java, PHP or .NET, he'll say "great", "sure" or "wow" (not because Joe's familiar with the technology or the theory, but because he's familiar with the terms). Tell Joe your webservices run on OCaml or Haskell and the best answer you can get will be "what?".
> 
> I doubt any user care about how facebook is implemented. Twitter and Foursquare run on Scala and
> this is not a very popular language.

You can develop web services using probably any programming language available in the world. That's what I was about to say, it doesn't matter from a technological point of view. So if the programming language is irrelevant, but you have to pick one, you'll start looking for arguments to prefer one over the other (based on available libraries, marketing, etc.). Some argument made Facebook pick PHP (instead of Perl, Java, Ruby, C/C++, OCaml, Haskell, Standard ML, whatever), probably something trivial like availability of PHP developers, or simply because PHP was popular at that time (i.e. there were people who knew the term "PHP").

Now the world looks different of course, there are hundreds of millions lines of existing code, and really porting all that code to a new language would involve a lot of effort, money and time.

Benedikt