From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr (mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.82]) by walapai.inria.fr (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id pBF7TxuL007134 for ; Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:29:59 +0100 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AnkBAHih6U5KfVI0imdsb2JhbABEhQqWGwGPfQgiAQEBCgkNBxIGIYILAg9INA8CJgIkEgEFAT0an1iCXAqLHZFRgS+HPoIEgRYElHWNdT2DeQ X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.71,356,1320620400"; d="scan'208";a="135490543" Received: from mail-ww0-f52.google.com ([74.125.82.52]) by mail1-smtp-roc.national.inria.fr with ESMTP/TLS/RC4-SHA; 15 Dec 2011 08:29:54 +0100 Received: by wgbdr12 with SMTP id dr12so4092334wgb.9 for ; Wed, 14 Dec 2011 23:29:53 -0800 (PST) MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.216.131.150 with SMTP id m22mr340642wei.8.1323934193814; Wed, 14 Dec 2011 23:29:53 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.180.106.8 with HTTP; Wed, 14 Dec 2011 23:29:53 -0800 (PST) Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:29:53 +0100 Message-ID: From: Andrej Bauer To: caml-list@inria.fr Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Subject: [Caml-list] Don't forget the user 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