Re: [Caml-list] OCaml maintenance status / community fork

["Gerd Stolpmann" <info@gerd-stolpmann.de>]

> Hi all,
>
> I will not jump in the "how to save OCaml from dying because nothing
> moves" discussion. But just in the "nothing moves" discussion.
>
> On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 2:52 PM, ivan chollet <ivan.chollet@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> The current status of OCaml is more than stable enough to serve its
>> goals,
>> which are to teach computer science to french undergrads and provide a
>> playground for computer languages researchers.
>
> First, french undergrads sadly often still use camllight... Which is
> not the case for example of Harvard undergrad
> (http://www.seas.harvard.edu/courses/cs51/lectures.html) and some
> UPenn one (http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis341/). But you are right that
> I can't find any well known university out of France using OCaml to
> teach computer science...

Well, if you ask whether _any_ FP language is taught, the results won't be
much better.

I'm currently doing consulting for a web company (in Germany) - around 60
developers, many fresh from the University. There are only three guys
knowing FP languages at all - one Scala, one Erlang, and one R. It's a
complete failure of the academic education.

IMHO it does not matter which FP language you are taught in. The point is
that the students understand the ideas, and that they recognize them as
relevant. These web developers here in the company have no clue that they
actually developing a big continuation-style FP program.

Gerd


>
> And for the "computer languages researchers" part, I'll refer you to
> http://caml.inria.fr/consortium/
>
>> A fork could possibly get traction from the community, but you would
>> have to
>> provide interesting features that the real OCaml does not provide. Bug
>> fixes
>> won't be enough.
>
> So now, here is my real problem. What are those famous so wanted
> feature that this fork will provide? And what makes you (a plural you)
> think that ocaml is such a slowly moving and evolving language?
> According to the caml web site, in the past two years, we've seen
> native dynlink, polymorphic recursion and first class module making
> there way into the language. According to what can be found on the
> trunk of the ocaml svn, the next release will have GADTs. And the
> compiler have also been modified to incorporate things like a nice
> multiprecision library (http://forge.ocamlcore.org/projects/zarith/)
> and some backends have been added.
>
> Except maybe haskell and Scala, can you really name me a programming
> language that in fact evolves that quickly, and basically without ever
> breaking backward compatibility? I really don't think that any of
> python, perl, java, C, C++ would really win. But I might be wrong.
>
> So before saying we need to fork the OCaml compiler to add "much
> needed patches", it would be nice to minimally agree on witch patches
> are so much needed. Because if "the community" can't agree on this, I
> doubt the future of this potential fork will be so bright.
>
> My 2c.
>
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>
>


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