[Caml-list] Don't forget the user

[Andrej Bauer <andrej.bauer@andrej.com>]

Recent discussions on how to improve the Ocaml-on-windows situation
are very welcome, but I see a lot of tech-speak and little feeling for
the users, who care just about one thing: to have a click & install
distribution of Ocaml that actually works.

Keep this in mind: 90% of potential Ocaml users are on Windows, and
they never heard of Mingw or Cygwin, and they never used a command
prompt.

It doesn't matter if the distribution is incomplete. It doesn't matter
what is under the hood. It doesn't matter what "the expert" thinks
about it, much less so what Linux people think about it (I am typing
this on a Linux box). Someone just needs to do it, and Jonathan
Protzenko seems an obvious candidate. Jonathan, if you have the time
to modify your distribution so that it become self-contained, i.e., it
contains mingw + ocaml (does _not_ separately install mingw, it just
sticks it under ocaml and then ocaml uses that, independently of
whether there already is a mingw on the system), I am sure that will
be received very positively by many people, even though "the experts"
will spit on it, and will point out that this is not The Right Way,
etc. Just do it.

Once we have such a thing, it can be optimized to our hearts content:
strip down mingw, check if mingw is already there, add support for
flexdll, etc.

The said fact is that I would _love_ to teach Ocaml to my students,
but I can't because installing Ocaml is too hard. Just give me
_anything_ that actually works. Otherwise I will keep teaching
"functional programming" with Mathematica...

That's my opinion.

With kind regards,

Andrej