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

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

[Dean Thompson]

A few years ago, with over 30 years of programming experience including 15 years primarily in Java, I decided I needed a new “home” programming language. I then spent a frustrating few years studying what’s out there. I have felt like a man without a country. I developed fairly serious crushes on Scala and then on Haskell, but after a few serious dates with them I moved on. I have read deeply about many, many more.

I have converged on OCaml. It is a beautiful language and a highly practical functional language. Although infrastructure such as compilers, editor/IDE support, and libraries are on the minimal side, the essentials are all there and are lovingly maintained. Although the community is small, it is smart, friendly, and engaged. Some amazing technology is available or work-in-progress (such as js_of_ocaml and Mirage).

But this feels like a fragile new home unless we can build a bigger community! For one thing, if our community shrinks much, it may no longer be viable. Also, while I love 1,000 packages on opam, I want 100,000!

As a newcomer to the community, I have to say that there are daunting barriers to a potential new user considering OCaml for a new project. If you like starting on a new programming language with a book, as I do, you likely start with Real World OCaml. That book is very inspiring! But then when you try to move from RWO to, well, using OCaml in the real world, you discover that there is no consensus on Core as a standard library, and that Camlp4 is deprecated.

It appears to me that if, instead, you come to OCaml as a potential new user through ocaml.org, there are other barriers. It is hard for me to judge because I came through RWO, but it appears to me that the lack of consensus on standard library comes up pretty quickly. I’m more of a language manual guy than a tutorial guy, so I quickly notice that, although the OCaml language manual is well written, has a lovely introductory flow, and has great examples, it fairly quickly gets into terse description of language constructs while providing limited help to a beginner in developing intuition for the language as a whole and how best to use it.

This is one man’s experience and one man’s opinions. Do others on this list feel the ramp to OCaml adoption is smoother than my impression suggests? 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?

Dean
--------
Dean Thompson
http://www.linkedin.com/in/deansthompson/

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

[Kakadu]

Folks, is second ppx-based edition of RWO being considered by original authors?

Kakadu

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 1:01 PM, Dean Thompson
<deansherthompson@gmail.com> wrote:
> A few years ago, with over 30 years of programming experience including 15 years primarily in Java, I decided I needed a new “home” programming language. I then spent a frustrating few years studying what’s out there. I have felt like a man without a country. I developed fairly serious crushes on Scala and then on Haskell, but after a few serious dates with them I moved on. I have read deeply about many, many more.
>
> I have converged on OCaml. It is a beautiful language and a highly practical functional language. Although infrastructure such as compilers, editor/IDE support, and libraries are on the minimal side, the essentials are all there and are lovingly maintained. Although the community is small, it is smart, friendly, and engaged. Some amazing technology is available or work-in-progress (such as js_of_ocaml and Mirage).
>
> But this feels like a fragile new home unless we can build a bigger community! For one thing, if our community shrinks much, it may no longer be viable. Also, while I love 1,000 packages on opam, I want 100,000!
>
> As a newcomer to the community, I have to say that there are daunting barriers to a potential new user considering OCaml for a new project. If you like starting on a new programming language with a book, as I do, you likely start with Real World OCaml. That book is very inspiring! But then when you try to move from RWO to, well, using OCaml in the real world, you discover that there is no consensus on Core as a standard library, and that Camlp4 is deprecated.
>
> It appears to me that if, instead, you come to OCaml as a potential new user through ocaml.org, there are other barriers. It is hard for me to judge because I came through RWO, but it appears to me that the lack of consensus on standard library comes up pretty quickly. I’m more of a language manual guy than a tutorial guy, so I quickly notice that, although the OCaml language manual is well written, has a lovely introductory flow, and has great examples, it fairly quickly gets into terse description of language constructs while providing limited help to a beginner in developing intuition for the language as a whole and how best to use it.
>
> This is one man’s experience and one man’s opinions. Do others on this list feel the ramp to OCaml adoption is smoother than my impression suggests? 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?
>
> Dean
> --------
> Dean Thompson
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/deansthompson/
>
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs

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

[Jeremy Yallop]

On 30 June 2016 at 11:01, Dean Thompson <deansherthompson@gmail.com> wrote:
> It is hard for me to judge because I came through RWO, but it appears to me that the lack of consensus on standard library comes up pretty quickly.

I think the standard library situation is much less of a concern than
it once was, now that it's easy to distribute small OCaml packages and
manage dependencies.

In the past distribution difficulties discouraged dependencies: for
example, even though many people prefer the design of ocaml-re and
ocaml-pcre to the regular expression facilities in the standard
library, the administrative overhead of an additional dependency made
the standard library the easier choice overall.  In that situation
it's desirable for the standard library to be large and featureful.
Nowadays there's much less benefit to having regular expression
support in the standard library, since depending on ocaml-re or
ocaml-pcre is just a matter of adding a line to an opam file and a few
lines to the build configuration.

The standard library still has a useful role to play, since it's
easier to make libraries interoperate if they can communicate via
common types, and several recent and proposed changes have that kind
of role in mind.  For example, the latest release of OCaml added a
'result' type to the standard library, which was previously defined in
incompatible but essentially equivalent ways in several libraries:

   https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/147

and there's a proposal for adding iterators to various container types
for the next release currently under discussion:

   https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/635

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

[Dean Thompson]

From my understanding so far, it seems to me that mixing and matching Core and not-Core would be tough? Everything from result types to Lwt vs Async? Given the inspirational and educational power of Real World OCaml, many newcomers will face this issue.

Dean


> On Jun 30, 2016, at 6:17 AM, Jeremy Yallop <yallop@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 30 June 2016 at 11:01, Dean Thompson <deansherthompson@gmail.com> wrote:
>> It is hard for me to judge because I came through RWO, but it appears to me that the lack of consensus on standard library comes up pretty quickly.
> 
> I think the standard library situation is much less of a concern than
> it once was, now that it's easy to distribute small OCaml packages and
> manage dependencies.
> 
> In the past distribution difficulties discouraged dependencies: for
> example, even though many people prefer the design of ocaml-re and
> ocaml-pcre to the regular expression facilities in the standard
> library, the administrative overhead of an additional dependency made
> the standard library the easier choice overall.  In that situation
> it's desirable for the standard library to be large and featureful.
> Nowadays there's much less benefit to having regular expression
> support in the standard library, since depending on ocaml-re or
> ocaml-pcre is just a matter of adding a line to an opam file and a few
> lines to the build configuration.
> 
> The standard library still has a useful role to play, since it's
> easier to make libraries interoperate if they can communicate via
> common types, and several recent and proposed changes have that kind
> of role in mind.  For example, the latest release of OCaml added a
> 'result' type to the standard library, which was previously defined in
> incompatible but essentially equivalent ways in several libraries:
> 
>   https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/147
> 
> and there's a proposal for adding iterators to various container types
> for the next release currently under discussion:
> 
>   https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/635

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

[Dean Thompson]

:-) Yaron, that's your cue.

Dean

> On Jun 30, 2016, at 6:16 AM, Kakadu <kakadu.hafanana@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Folks, is second ppx-based edition of RWO being considered by original authors?
> 
> Kakadu
> 
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 1:01 PM, Dean Thompson
> <deansherthompson@gmail.com> wrote:
>> A few years ago, with over 30 years of programming experience including 15 years primarily in Java, I decided I needed a new “home” programming language. I then spent a frustrating few years studying what’s out there. I have felt like a man without a country. I developed fairly serious crushes on Scala and then on Haskell, but after a few serious dates with them I moved on. I have read deeply about many, many more.
>> 
>> I have converged on OCaml. It is a beautiful language and a highly practical functional language. Although infrastructure such as compilers, editor/IDE support, and libraries are on the minimal side, the essentials are all there and are lovingly maintained. Although the community is small, it is smart, friendly, and engaged. Some amazing technology is available or work-in-progress (such as js_of_ocaml and Mirage).
>> 
>> But this feels like a fragile new home unless we can build a bigger community! For one thing, if our community shrinks much, it may no longer be viable. Also, while I love 1,000 packages on opam, I want 100,000!
>> 
>> As a newcomer to the community, I have to say that there are daunting barriers to a potential new user considering OCaml for a new project. If you like starting on a new programming language with a book, as I do, you likely start with Real World OCaml. That book is very inspiring! But then when you try to move from RWO to, well, using OCaml in the real world, you discover that there is no consensus on Core as a standard library, and that Camlp4 is deprecated.
>> 
>> It appears to me that if, instead, you come to OCaml as a potential new user through ocaml.org, there are other barriers. It is hard for me to judge because I came through RWO, but it appears to me that the lack of consensus on standard library comes up pretty quickly. I’m more of a language manual guy than a tutorial guy, so I quickly notice that, although the OCaml language manual is well written, has a lovely introductory flow, and has great examples, it fairly quickly gets into terse description of language constructs while providing limited help to a beginner in developing intuition for the language as a whole and how best to use it.
>> 
>> This is one man’s experience and one man’s opinions. Do others on this list feel the ramp to OCaml adoption is smoother than my impression suggests? 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?
>> 
>> Dean
>> --------
>> Dean Thompson
>> http://www.linkedin.com/in/deansthompson/
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
> 
> -- 
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs

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

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

Yes, we're working on an updated version of RWO. No firm ETA yet, but expect an online refresh first.

regards,
Anil

> On 30 Jun 2016, at 11:16, Kakadu <kakadu.hafanana@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Folks, is second ppx-based edition of RWO being considered by original authors?
> 
> Kakadu
> 
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 1:01 PM, Dean Thompson
> <deansherthompson@gmail.com> wrote:
>> A few years ago, with over 30 years of programming experience including 15 years primarily in Java, I decided I needed a new “home” programming language. I then spent a frustrating few years studying what’s out there. I have felt like a man without a country. I developed fairly serious crushes on Scala and then on Haskell, but after a few serious dates with them I moved on. I have read deeply about many, many more.
>> 
>> I have converged on OCaml. It is a beautiful language and a highly practical functional language. Although infrastructure such as compilers, editor/IDE support, and libraries are on the minimal side, the essentials are all there and are lovingly maintained. Although the community is small, it is smart, friendly, and engaged. Some amazing technology is available or work-in-progress (such as js_of_ocaml and Mirage).
>> 
>> But this feels like a fragile new home unless we can build a bigger community! For one thing, if our community shrinks much, it may no longer be viable. Also, while I love 1,000 packages on opam, I want 100,000!
>> 
>> As a newcomer to the community, I have to say that there are daunting barriers to a potential new user considering OCaml for a new project. If you like starting on a new programming language with a book, as I do, you likely start with Real World OCaml. That book is very inspiring! But then when you try to move from RWO to, well, using OCaml in the real world, you discover that there is no consensus on Core as a standard library, and that Camlp4 is deprecated.
>> 
>> It appears to me that if, instead, you come to OCaml as a potential new user through ocaml.org, there are other barriers. It is hard for me to judge because I came through RWO, but it appears to me that the lack of consensus on standard library comes up pretty quickly. I’m more of a language manual guy than a tutorial guy, so I quickly notice that, although the OCaml language manual is well written, has a lovely introductory flow, and has great examples, it fairly quickly gets into terse description of language constructs while providing limited help to a beginner in developing intuition for the language as a whole and how best to use it.
>> 
>> This is one man’s experience and one man’s opinions. Do others on this list feel the ramp to OCaml adoption is smoother than my impression suggests? 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?
>> 
>> Dean
>> --------
>> Dean Thompson
>> http://www.linkedin.com/in/deansthompson/
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
> 
> -- 
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs

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

[Gerd Stolpmann]

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Dean,

it is great to see that OCaml is again seen as attractive. This is
fairly different now than, say, 10 years back, when OCaml had a really
hard time (academic projects were finished, and it was unclear whether
other users could be found). At that time, this home was really fragile,
short before collapsing. Fortunately, this did not happen, and now there
is a supporting community, small but to large parts brilliant.

In some sense, there is now the problem of too much choice. You say
you'd like to see 100000 packages. Actually, I'm fearing such a
situation - picking up a common metaphor it would mean there are lots of
wheels which are incompatible to each other. That's not only the choice
of standard library, but also other important base libraries like for
asynchronous networking. I'm not against choice of implementation, but
this small community should definitely do more to avoid unnecessary
fragmentation. Jeremy Yallop kind of answered this for the standard
library: the one coming with the compiler should be the one establishing
base types (like result) so that other libraries can pick that up and
remain compatible on this level. Libraries like Core would then be pure
add-ons.

Fortunately, OCaml added some features that could turn out as very
helpful in that respect. In particular first-class modules help here:
you can now pass modules around like values. I'm hoping that this is
picked up to make currently incompatible implementations again
interoperable on a fundamental level (e.g. Async and Lwt could agree on
a common module type for the core features so that users can run Lwt
with Async's core and vice versa). This gives users additional freedom,
and they are not faced with the question whether they should either go
to Lwt-land or Async-land.

But anyway, I guess you are not yet at this point, and are enjoying
things that are working well. I recently got thrown into the muddy
waters of Scala, and while they are better organized it is feeling like
a dinosaur language. I definitely prefer OCaml's minimalism.

Gerd

Am Donnerstag, den 30.06.2016, 06:01 -0400 schrieb Dean Thompson:
> A few years ago, with over 30 years of programming experience including 15 years primarily in Java, I decided I needed a new “home” programming language. I then spent a frustrating few years studying what’s out there. I have felt like a man without a country. I developed fairly serious crushes on Scala and then on Haskell, but after a few serious dates with them I moved on. I have read deeply about many, many more.
> 
> I have converged on OCaml. It is a beautiful language and a highly practical functional language. Although infrastructure such as compilers, editor/IDE support, and libraries are on the minimal side, the essentials are all there and are lovingly maintained. Although the community is small, it is smart, friendly, and engaged. Some amazing technology is available or work-in-progress (such as js_of_ocaml and Mirage).
> 
> But this feels like a fragile new home unless we can build a bigger community! For one thing, if our community shrinks much, it may no longer be viable. Also, while I love 1,000 packages on opam, I want 100,000!
> 
> As a newcomer to the community, I have to say that there are daunting barriers to a potential new user considering OCaml for a new project. If you like starting on a new programming language with a book, as I do, you likely start with Real World OCaml. That book is very inspiring! But then when you try to move from RWO to, well, using OCaml in the real world, you discover that there is no consensus on Core as a standard library, and that Camlp4 is deprecated.
> 
> It appears to me that if, instead, you come to OCaml as a potential new user through ocaml.org, there are other barriers. It is hard for me to judge because I came through RWO, but it appears to me that the lack of consensus on standard library comes up pretty quickly. I’m more of a language manual guy than a tutorial guy, so I quickly notice that, although the OCaml language manual is well written, has a lovely introductory flow, and has great examples, it fairly quickly gets into terse description of language constructs while providing limited help to a beginner in developing intuition for the language as a whole and how best to use it.
> 
> This is one man’s experience and one man’s opinions. Do others on this list feel the ramp to OCaml adoption is smoother than my impression suggests? 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?
> 
> Dean
> --------
> Dean Thompson
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/deansthompson/
> 
> 

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Gerd Stolpmann, Darmstadt, Germany    gerd@gerd-stolpmann.de
My OCaml site:          http://www.camlcity.org
Contact details:        http://www.camlcity.org/contact.html
Company homepage:       http://www.gerd-stolpmann.de
------------------------------------------------------------


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

[Yaron Minsky]

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A few thoughts:

As Anil said, we're working on an updated RWO, which should resolve the
camlp4 issue.

As for mixing and matching between libraries that do and don't depend on
Core, there's actually little difficulty here. Core sticks to the standard
interchange types (array, string, option, list, char, and now result) that
are provided by the stdlib, so whether you use Core (or Core_kernel)
becomes more a matter of personal preference, and shouldn't hinder
interoperability.

One remaining problem with Core is the minimal executable size, which is
currently much bigger if you use Core. We're considering some work in three
next few months to make this much better.

Async and Lwt are a real problem. They provide very similar functionality,
and mixing and matching between two schedulers is not so easy. I'd love to
see some resolution here, but it's not clear what the solution would be.
Perhaps once we resolve the executable size issues of Core, there will be
more appetite for some kind of merger of the two libraries.  In the
meantime, we're highly committed to continuing development and support for
Async.

y
On Jun 30, 2016 6:32 AM, "Dean Thompson" <deansherthompson@gmail.com> wrote:

> From my understanding so far, it seems to me that mixing and matching Core
> and not-Core would be tough? Everything from result types to Lwt vs Async?
> Given the inspirational and educational power of Real World OCaml, many
> newcomers will face this issue.
>
> Dean
>
>
> > On Jun 30, 2016, at 6:17 AM, Jeremy Yallop <yallop@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On 30 June 2016 at 11:01, Dean Thompson <deansherthompson@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> It is hard for me to judge because I came through RWO, but it appears
> to me that the lack of consensus on standard library comes up pretty
> quickly.
> >
> > I think the standard library situation is much less of a concern than
> > it once was, now that it's easy to distribute small OCaml packages and
> > manage dependencies.
> >
> > In the past distribution difficulties discouraged dependencies: for
> > example, even though many people prefer the design of ocaml-re and
> > ocaml-pcre to the regular expression facilities in the standard
> > library, the administrative overhead of an additional dependency made
> > the standard library the easier choice overall.  In that situation
> > it's desirable for the standard library to be large and featureful.
> > Nowadays there's much less benefit to having regular expression
> > support in the standard library, since depending on ocaml-re or
> > ocaml-pcre is just a matter of adding a line to an opam file and a few
> > lines to the build configuration.
> >
> > The standard library still has a useful role to play, since it's
> > easier to make libraries interoperate if they can communicate via
> > common types, and several recent and proposed changes have that kind
> > of role in mind.  For example, the latest release of OCaml added a
> > 'result' type to the standard library, which was previously defined in
> > incompatible but essentially equivalent ways in several libraries:
> >
> >   https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/147
> >
> > and there's a proposal for adding iterators to various container types
> > for the next release currently under discussion:
> >
> >   https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/635
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs

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

[Ivan Gotovchits]

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On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 8:12 AM, Yaron Minsky <yminsky@janestreet.com>
wrote:

> A few thoughts:
>
> As Anil said, we're working on an updated RWO, which should resolve the
> camlp4 issue.
>
> As for mixing and matching between libraries that do and don't depend on
> Core, there's actually little difficulty here. Core sticks to the standard
> interchange types (array, string, option, list, char, and now result) that
> are provided by the stdlib, so whether you use Core (or Core_kernel)
> becomes more a matter of personal preference, and shouldn't hinder
> interoperability.
>
> One remaining problem with Core is the minimal executable size, which is
> currently much bigger if you use Core. We're considering some work in three
> next few months to make this much better.
>
> Async and Lwt are a real problem. They provide very similar functionality,
> and mixing and matching between two schedulers is not so easy. I'd love to
> see some resolution here, but it's not clear what the solution would be.
>
The solution would be to use the same approach as with standard types. We
need a common base inductive type for `Lwt.t` (aka `Ivar.t`), which will
represent a value which is defined in some point in the future (hence a
`future` is a good name). Another type is for capturing a concept of a
variable that can have multiple values in the future, that is represented
as `Lwt_stream.t` or `Pipe`. Currently in both Lwt and Async the main
thread type is tightly coupled with the underlying implementation,
especially in Async (Lwt.t can be easily decoupled).

> y
> On Jun 30, 2016 6:32 AM, "Dean Thompson" <deansherthompson@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> From my understanding so far, it seems to me that mixing and matching
>> Core and not-Core would be tough? Everything from result types to Lwt vs
>> Async? Given the inspirational and educational power of Real World OCaml,
>> many newcomers will face this issue.
>>
>> Dean
>>
>>
>> > On Jun 30, 2016, at 6:17 AM, Jeremy Yallop <yallop@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> On 30 June 2016 at 11:01, Dean Thompson <deansherthompson@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >> It is hard for me to judge because I came through RWO, but it appears
>> to me that the lack of consensus on standard library comes up pretty
>> quickly.
>> >
>> > I think the standard library situation is much less of a concern than
>> > it once was, now that it's easy to distribute small OCaml packages and
>> > manage dependencies.
>> >
>> > In the past distribution difficulties discouraged dependencies: for
>> > example, even though many people prefer the design of ocaml-re and
>> > ocaml-pcre to the regular expression facilities in the standard
>> > library, the administrative overhead of an additional dependency made
>> > the standard library the easier choice overall.  In that situation
>> > it's desirable for the standard library to be large and featureful.
>> > Nowadays there's much less benefit to having regular expression
>> > support in the standard library, since depending on ocaml-re or
>> > ocaml-pcre is just a matter of adding a line to an opam file and a few
>> > lines to the build configuration.
>> >
>> > The standard library still has a useful role to play, since it's
>> > easier to make libraries interoperate if they can communicate via
>> > common types, and several recent and proposed changes have that kind
>> > of role in mind.  For example, the latest release of OCaml added a
>> > 'result' type to the standard library, which was previously defined in
>> > incompatible but essentially equivalent ways in several libraries:
>> >
>> >   https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/147
>> >
>> > and there's a proposal for adding iterators to various container types
>> > for the next release currently under discussion:
>> >
>> >   https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/635
>>
>> --
>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>
>

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

[Yaron Minsky]

I'm not at all sure that the decoupling is possible or wise for Async.
My intuition is that this is too complex of a problem with too much
need for careful optimization to be able to have a simple, shared
generic data structure for this.

The solution that seems most plausible to me is to settle on one
implementation, and port the API of one library to run on top of the
other. There was indeed an experiment in this direction that was done
by Jeremie Dimino:

https://github.com/janestreet/lwt-async

That said, until we resolve the binary size issues with Core and
therefore Async, I doubt that this solution would be appealing to the
full community of lwt users.

y

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 9:13 AM, Ivan Gotovchits <ivg@ieee.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 8:12 AM, Yaron Minsky <yminsky@janestreet.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> A few thoughts:
>>
>> As Anil said, we're working on an updated RWO, which should resolve the
>> camlp4 issue.
>>
>> As for mixing and matching between libraries that do and don't depend on
>> Core, there's actually little difficulty here. Core sticks to the standard
>> interchange types (array, string, option, list, char, and now result) that
>> are provided by the stdlib, so whether you use Core (or Core_kernel) becomes
>> more a matter of personal preference, and shouldn't hinder interoperability.
>>
>> One remaining problem with Core is the minimal executable size, which is
>> currently much bigger if you use Core. We're considering some work in three
>> next few months to make this much better.
>>
>> Async and Lwt are a real problem. They provide very similar functionality,
>> and mixing and matching between two schedulers is not so easy. I'd love to
>> see some resolution here, but it's not clear what the solution would be.
>
> The solution would be to use the same approach as with standard types. We
> need a common base inductive type for `Lwt.t` (aka `Ivar.t`), which will
> represent a value which is defined in some point in the future (hence a
> `future` is a good name). Another type is for capturing a concept of a
> variable that can have multiple values in the future, that is represented as
> `Lwt_stream.t` or `Pipe`. Currently in both Lwt and Async the main thread
> type is tightly coupled with the underlying implementation, especially in
> Async (Lwt.t can be easily decoupled).
>>
>> y
>>
>> On Jun 30, 2016 6:32 AM, "Dean Thompson" <deansherthompson@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> From my understanding so far, it seems to me that mixing and matching
>>> Core and not-Core would be tough? Everything from result types to Lwt vs
>>> Async? Given the inspirational and educational power of Real World OCaml,
>>> many newcomers will face this issue.
>>>
>>> Dean
>>>
>>>
>>> > On Jun 30, 2016, at 6:17 AM, Jeremy Yallop <yallop@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> >
>>> >> On 30 June 2016 at 11:01, Dean Thompson <deansherthompson@gmail.com>
>>> >> wrote:
>>> >> It is hard for me to judge because I came through RWO, but it appears
>>> >> to me that the lack of consensus on standard library comes up pretty
>>> >> quickly.
>>> >
>>> > I think the standard library situation is much less of a concern than
>>> > it once was, now that it's easy to distribute small OCaml packages and
>>> > manage dependencies.
>>> >
>>> > In the past distribution difficulties discouraged dependencies: for
>>> > example, even though many people prefer the design of ocaml-re and
>>> > ocaml-pcre to the regular expression facilities in the standard
>>> > library, the administrative overhead of an additional dependency made
>>> > the standard library the easier choice overall.  In that situation
>>> > it's desirable for the standard library to be large and featureful.
>>> > Nowadays there's much less benefit to having regular expression
>>> > support in the standard library, since depending on ocaml-re or
>>> > ocaml-pcre is just a matter of adding a line to an opam file and a few
>>> > lines to the build configuration.
>>> >
>>> > The standard library still has a useful role to play, since it's
>>> > easier to make libraries interoperate if they can communicate via
>>> > common types, and several recent and proposed changes have that kind
>>> > of role in mind.  For example, the latest release of OCaml added a
>>> > 'result' type to the standard library, which was previously defined in
>>> > incompatible but essentially equivalent ways in several libraries:
>>> >
>>> >   https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/147
>>> >
>>> > and there's a proposal for adding iterators to various container types
>>> > for the next release currently under discussion:
>>> >
>>> >   https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/635
>>>
>>> --
>>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>
>

[Caml-list] Async and lwt

[Hendrik Boom]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 08:13:58PM -0400, Yaron Minsky wrote:
> I'm not at all sure that the decoupling is possible or wise for Async.
> My intuition is that this is too complex of a problem with too much
> need for careful optimization to be able to have a simple, shared
> generic data structure for this.
> 
> The solution that seems most plausible to me is to settle on one
> implementation, and port the API of one library to run on top of the
> other. There was indeed an experiment in this direction that was done
> by Jeremie Dimino:
> 
> https://github.com/janestreet/lwt-async
> 
> That said, until we resolve the binary size issues with Core and
> therefore Async, I doubt that this solution would be appealing to the
> full community of lwt users.

What are the conceptual differences between Async and lwt?  Does either 
of them manage to take advantage of a shared-heap multicore system?

-- hendrik

Re: [Caml-list] Async and lwt

[Yaron Minsky]

The conceptual differences are pretty thin; there are some error
handling differences, but they're not huge.

As for the shared heap question: Async greatly improves the
programmers ability to reason about concurrent code by providing clear
bounds on when interleaving can happen.  In particular, a given job
scheduled to run as part of Async can never be interrupted by another
async job. That means interleavings can effectively only happen where
you use a bind operator to string two closures together, and so one is
rarely exposed to race conditions. That means that Async program
typically don't need to think much about locking, and race conditions
stop being your primary source of bugs.

Using Async in the context of shared heap parallelism gives up these
guarantees, and puts you back in mutex/sempahore/condition-variable
hell.  My guess is that we'll end up taking advantage of the multicore
GC by running multiple Async schedulers, one per domain (e.g., OS
thread), and having carefully written primitives for sharing
data-structures and efficiently sending immutable messages between
these domains.  But I think just freely scheduling Async jobs across
multiple physical threads seems like a disaster from the point of view
of producing comprehensible, reliable code.

y

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 8:41 PM, Hendrik Boom <hendrik@topoi.pooq.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 08:13:58PM -0400, Yaron Minsky wrote:
>> I'm not at all sure that the decoupling is possible or wise for Async.
>> My intuition is that this is too complex of a problem with too much
>> need for careful optimization to be able to have a simple, shared
>> generic data structure for this.
>>
>> The solution that seems most plausible to me is to settle on one
>> implementation, and port the API of one library to run on top of the
>> other. There was indeed an experiment in this direction that was done
>> by Jeremie Dimino:
>>
>> https://github.com/janestreet/lwt-async
>>
>> That said, until we resolve the binary size issues with Core and
>> therefore Async, I doubt that this solution would be appealing to the
>> full community of lwt users.
>
> What are the conceptual differences between Async and lwt?  Does either
> of them manage to take advantage of a shared-heap multicore system?
>
> -- hendrik
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs

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

[Dean Thompson]

Yaron, since you describe janestreet/lwt-async as "an experiment in this direction”, could you give a quick overview of how a practical lwt-async would compare with what was done there?

Dean

> On Jun 30, 2016, at 8:13 PM, Yaron Minsky <yminsky@janestreet.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm not at all sure that the decoupling is possible or wise for Async.
> My intuition is that this is too complex of a problem with too much
> need for careful optimization to be able to have a simple, shared
> generic data structure for this.
> 
> The solution that seems most plausible to me is to settle on one
> implementation, and port the API of one library to run on top of the
> other. There was indeed an experiment in this direction that was done
> by Jeremie Dimino:
> 
> https://github.com/janestreet/lwt-async
> 
> That said, until we resolve the binary size issues with Core and
> therefore Async, I doubt that this solution would be appealing to the
> full community of lwt users.
> 
> y
> 
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 9:13 AM, Ivan Gotovchits <ivg@ieee.org> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 8:12 AM, Yaron Minsky <yminsky@janestreet.com>
>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> A few thoughts:
>>> 
>>> As Anil said, we're working on an updated RWO, which should resolve the
>>> camlp4 issue.
>>> 
>>> As for mixing and matching between libraries that do and don't depend on
>>> Core, there's actually little difficulty here. Core sticks to the standard
>>> interchange types (array, string, option, list, char, and now result) that
>>> are provided by the stdlib, so whether you use Core (or Core_kernel) becomes
>>> more a matter of personal preference, and shouldn't hinder interoperability.
>>> 
>>> One remaining problem with Core is the minimal executable size, which is
>>> currently much bigger if you use Core. We're considering some work in three
>>> next few months to make this much better.
>>> 
>>> Async and Lwt are a real problem. They provide very similar functionality,
>>> and mixing and matching between two schedulers is not so easy. I'd love to
>>> see some resolution here, but it's not clear what the solution would be.
>> 
>> The solution would be to use the same approach as with standard types. We
>> need a common base inductive type for `Lwt.t` (aka `Ivar.t`), which will
>> represent a value which is defined in some point in the future (hence a
>> `future` is a good name). Another type is for capturing a concept of a
>> variable that can have multiple values in the future, that is represented as
>> `Lwt_stream.t` or `Pipe`. Currently in both Lwt and Async the main thread
>> type is tightly coupled with the underlying implementation, especially in
>> Async (Lwt.t can be easily decoupled).
>>> 
>>> y
>>> 
>>> On Jun 30, 2016 6:32 AM, "Dean Thompson" <deansherthompson@gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> From my understanding so far, it seems to me that mixing and matching
>>>> Core and not-Core would be tough? Everything from result types to Lwt vs
>>>> Async? Given the inspirational and educational power of Real World OCaml,
>>>> many newcomers will face this issue.
>>>> 
>>>> Dean
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> On Jun 30, 2016, at 6:17 AM, Jeremy Yallop <yallop@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> On 30 June 2016 at 11:01, Dean Thompson <deansherthompson@gmail.com>
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> It is hard for me to judge because I came through RWO, but it appears
>>>>>> to me that the lack of consensus on standard library comes up pretty
>>>>>> quickly.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I think the standard library situation is much less of a concern than
>>>>> it once was, now that it's easy to distribute small OCaml packages and
>>>>> manage dependencies.
>>>>> 
>>>>> In the past distribution difficulties discouraged dependencies: for
>>>>> example, even though many people prefer the design of ocaml-re and
>>>>> ocaml-pcre to the regular expression facilities in the standard
>>>>> library, the administrative overhead of an additional dependency made
>>>>> the standard library the easier choice overall.  In that situation
>>>>> it's desirable for the standard library to be large and featureful.
>>>>> Nowadays there's much less benefit to having regular expression
>>>>> support in the standard library, since depending on ocaml-re or
>>>>> ocaml-pcre is just a matter of adding a line to an opam file and a few
>>>>> lines to the build configuration.
>>>>> 
>>>>> The standard library still has a useful role to play, since it's
>>>>> easier to make libraries interoperate if they can communicate via
>>>>> common types, and several recent and proposed changes have that kind
>>>>> of role in mind.  For example, the latest release of OCaml added a
>>>>> 'result' type to the standard library, which was previously defined in
>>>>> incompatible but essentially equivalent ways in several libraries:
>>>>> 
>>>>>  https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/147
>>>>> 
>>>>> and there's a proposal for adding iterators to various container types
>>>>> for the next release currently under discussion:
>>>>> 
>>>>>  https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/635
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>>>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>>>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>>>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>> 
>> 

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

[Yaron Minsky]

Jeremie (who is currently on vacation) could probably say more about
the technical merits.  I mostly think it's good enough, except for the
fact that the executable size is portable, and Async hasn't yet gotten
support for running on Windows (although it does run fine on
Javascript.)

I think if those things are done, and Lwt users were eager to use it,
I suspect it would be pretty close to workable.

y

On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 8:44 AM, Dean Thompson
<deansherthompson@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yaron, since you describe janestreet/lwt-async as "an experiment in this direction”, could you give a quick overview of how a practical lwt-async would compare with what was done there?
>
> Dean
>
>> On Jun 30, 2016, at 8:13 PM, Yaron Minsky <yminsky@janestreet.com> wrote:
>>
>> I'm not at all sure that the decoupling is possible or wise for Async.
>> My intuition is that this is too complex of a problem with too much
>> need for careful optimization to be able to have a simple, shared
>> generic data structure for this.
>>
>> The solution that seems most plausible to me is to settle on one
>> implementation, and port the API of one library to run on top of the
>> other. There was indeed an experiment in this direction that was done
>> by Jeremie Dimino:
>>
>> https://github.com/janestreet/lwt-async
>>
>> That said, until we resolve the binary size issues with Core and
>> therefore Async, I doubt that this solution would be appealing to the
>> full community of lwt users.
>>
>> y
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 9:13 AM, Ivan Gotovchits <ivg@ieee.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 8:12 AM, Yaron Minsky <yminsky@janestreet.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> A few thoughts:
>>>>
>>>> As Anil said, we're working on an updated RWO, which should resolve the
>>>> camlp4 issue.
>>>>
>>>> As for mixing and matching between libraries that do and don't depend on
>>>> Core, there's actually little difficulty here. Core sticks to the standard
>>>> interchange types (array, string, option, list, char, and now result) that
>>>> are provided by the stdlib, so whether you use Core (or Core_kernel) becomes
>>>> more a matter of personal preference, and shouldn't hinder interoperability.
>>>>
>>>> One remaining problem with Core is the minimal executable size, which is
>>>> currently much bigger if you use Core. We're considering some work in three
>>>> next few months to make this much better.
>>>>
>>>> Async and Lwt are a real problem. They provide very similar functionality,
>>>> and mixing and matching between two schedulers is not so easy. I'd love to
>>>> see some resolution here, but it's not clear what the solution would be.
>>>
>>> The solution would be to use the same approach as with standard types. We
>>> need a common base inductive type for `Lwt.t` (aka `Ivar.t`), which will
>>> represent a value which is defined in some point in the future (hence a
>>> `future` is a good name). Another type is for capturing a concept of a
>>> variable that can have multiple values in the future, that is represented as
>>> `Lwt_stream.t` or `Pipe`. Currently in both Lwt and Async the main thread
>>> type is tightly coupled with the underlying implementation, especially in
>>> Async (Lwt.t can be easily decoupled).
>>>>
>>>> y
>>>>
>>>> On Jun 30, 2016 6:32 AM, "Dean Thompson" <deansherthompson@gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> From my understanding so far, it seems to me that mixing and matching
>>>>> Core and not-Core would be tough? Everything from result types to Lwt vs
>>>>> Async? Given the inspirational and educational power of Real World OCaml,
>>>>> many newcomers will face this issue.
>>>>>
>>>>> Dean
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> On Jun 30, 2016, at 6:17 AM, Jeremy Yallop <yallop@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On 30 June 2016 at 11:01, Dean Thompson <deansherthompson@gmail.com>
>>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>> It is hard for me to judge because I came through RWO, but it appears
>>>>>>> to me that the lack of consensus on standard library comes up pretty
>>>>>>> quickly.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I think the standard library situation is much less of a concern than
>>>>>> it once was, now that it's easy to distribute small OCaml packages and
>>>>>> manage dependencies.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In the past distribution difficulties discouraged dependencies: for
>>>>>> example, even though many people prefer the design of ocaml-re and
>>>>>> ocaml-pcre to the regular expression facilities in the standard
>>>>>> library, the administrative overhead of an additional dependency made
>>>>>> the standard library the easier choice overall.  In that situation
>>>>>> it's desirable for the standard library to be large and featureful.
>>>>>> Nowadays there's much less benefit to having regular expression
>>>>>> support in the standard library, since depending on ocaml-re or
>>>>>> ocaml-pcre is just a matter of adding a line to an opam file and a few
>>>>>> lines to the build configuration.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The standard library still has a useful role to play, since it's
>>>>>> easier to make libraries interoperate if they can communicate via
>>>>>> common types, and several recent and proposed changes have that kind
>>>>>> of role in mind.  For example, the latest release of OCaml added a
>>>>>> 'result' type to the standard library, which was previously defined in
>>>>>> incompatible but essentially equivalent ways in several libraries:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>  https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/147
>>>>>>
>>>>>> and there's a proposal for adding iterators to various container types
>>>>>> for the next release currently under discussion:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>  https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/635
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>>>>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>>>>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>>>>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>>>
>>>
>

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

[sp]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 08:13:58PM -0400, Yaron Minsky wrote:
> The solution that seems most plausible to me is to settle on one
> implementation, and port the API of one library to run on top of the
> other. There was indeed an experiment in this direction that was done
> by Jeremie Dimino:
> https://github.com/janestreet/lwt-async

I too think that a fused approach is the best one. A library which
will be backwards compatible with both ancestors to begin with and the deprecate
parts of it as we move forward.

-- 
	SP

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

[sp]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 06:01:41AM -0400, Dean Thompson wrote:
> But this feels like a fragile new home unless we can build a bigger community!
> For one thing, if our community shrinks much, it may no longer be viable.
> Also, while I love 1,000 packages on opam, I want 100,000!

OCaml's community size has advantages and disadvantages. I started taking
interest almost a year ago, after Haskell. One thing I didn't like about it's
community was that every other month there would be an reincarnation of an
implementation using the latest (immature or ill-conceived at times) conceptual
abstraction.

I'm not suggesting that we should enforce the size; I'm just sayin don't
overstimate the size of the community or volume of packages.

> As a newcomer to the community, I have to say that there are daunting barriers
> to a potential new user considering OCaml for a new project. If you like
> starting on a new programming language with a book, as I do, you likely start
> with Real World OCaml. That book is very inspiring! But then when you try to
> move from RWO to, well, using OCaml in the real world, you discover that there
> is no consensus on Core as a standard library, and that Camlp4 is deprecated.

I agree with you, same findings. You should checkout the IRC channel if you
haven't already. I got a lot of help from the people there in terms of choosing
between options (Core / Batteries)  and explanation of the latest advancments
(camlp4).

My feeling is that most of the folk in the community are serious and to the
point.. like OCaml ;)

> It appears to me that if, instead, you come to OCaml as a potential new user
> through ocaml.org, there are other barriers. It is hard for me to judge
> because I came through RWO, but it appears to me that the lack of consensus on
> standard library comes up pretty quickly.

This is recognised in the community and others have already answered. One day,
hopefully we can have an effective merge of the parallel efforts.
I for one avoid both as much as I can until there is a merge :)

-- 
	SP

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

[Dean Thompson]

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

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

[Francois Berenger]

On 08/07/2016 14:57, Dean Thompson 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.

Just a personal viewpoint: I have a feeling that another functional 
language with strong static types has a much larger user community.

By larger, I mean it looks like they are way above the critical mass of 
a healthy open source community.
And I feel that for OCaml we are under this critical mass.

Just a few figures I could collect: on github there are 8018 
repositories using OCaml and 1875 users.
While there are 49872 repositories for Haskell and 6728 users !

PS: those are just _some_ figures out of all the ones we could collect,
     so please take them with a grain of salt.

-- 
Regards,
Francois.
"When in doubt, use more types"

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

[Gabriel Scherer]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 5066 bytes --]

> 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>
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
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>

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

[Duane Johnson]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 7921 bytes --]

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 8:40 AM, Gabriel Scherer <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. 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 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 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 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>
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>
> 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>>
>
>

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

[Roberto Di Cosmo]

Hi Duane,
   thanks for your message: I found it is a very interesting outsider's point of view.

I would just like to remark that what you point out is more along an "image"
dimension, than a "substance" one.

The world is full of exciting "modern" programming languages that change syntax
and semantics every couple of months, or that force you to write zillions of
"modern" unit tests just to make sure you did not mix integers with strings,
while in the ML (and OCaml world) we just keep writing safe and elegant code
since the 1980's.

If you scratch a bit the surface, it's easy to see that a lof of the "new"
exciting technology around is actually "has been", while the "old" technology
underlying OCaml is actually "revolutionary".

If you share this point of view, please come along and lend a hand, help
us become more fashionable, and help OCaml get an "image" that better
correspond to its great "substance"

Cheers

--
Roberto

P.S.: by the way, it's inria.fr, not infria.fr, or, in old technology
      terms, s/infria/inria/g :-)

On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 09:16:09AM -0600, Duane Johnson wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 8:40 AM, Gabriel Scherer <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. 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 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 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 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>
> 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>
>     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
>        
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>         --
>         Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>         https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>         Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>         Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
> 
> 
> 
> 

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

[Yotam Barnoy]

Roberto, you make a good point, but I'd like to make the counterpoint
that what you call 'image' is almost as important as, if not even more
important, than what you call 'substance'.

Many great programming languages never made it out of the labs in
which they were conceived. Other languages thrived and then died.
Creating a language involves much more than having good core ideas --
community and tooling determines whether the language will actually
succeed. The language itself is the DNA, but the environment
(community, ecosystem, tooling) determines all else.

Duane points out that the tooling that is visible to the outside world
is old, and he's right. Remember that people on this list expressed
great reluctance towards moving the OCaml codebase to github, even
though to those of us who experienced the order-of-magnitude
improvements of github over everything that preceded it, the
advantages were obvious. There's a tendency for programmers to get
'old fogey syndrome' with respect to technologies that came out later
than the ones they use in their day-to-day lives. This is similar, I
think, to people not liking music that came out after the music from
their own generation. The reality is that tooling improves
consistently, and generally speaking an old tool will not be as good
as a newer one that builds on experience from the older one. The main
exceptions to this rule that come to mind are when old tools took
unique approaches that were later deemed too revolutionary or niche to
be built upon (mainly vim and emacs, though I'm sure people can think
of others).

It would be really nice for the mailing list to use the new ocaml.org
domain, which should be the outward face of OCaml.
Additionally, I think an official gitter.im page should be considered.
Many people are afraid to express their every thought and question on
the mailing list for fear of backlash or that they will be thought to
be spamming (a very realistic assessment, I may add). Users are much
more likely to communicate in a realtime chat environment like gitter.
IRC is simply incompatible with today's world -- many people cannot
access IRC from work, the logs aren't easily available etc as stated
by Duane. As an additional idea, the neovim project was able to create
a bridge between its IRC channel and its gitter.im page
(https://gitter.im/neovim/neovim).

Of course, the deeper tooling issues are with things like the build
system. It's remarkable how easy it is in a language like Rust to
build a project and pull down its dependencies. Of course Rust is a
newcomer, which allowed it to avoid all the legacy issues we're
suffering from. It's extremely unfortunate that we ended up with so
many different build systems, not to mention multiple standard
libraries.

-Yotam

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 11:33 AM, Roberto Di Cosmo <roberto@dicosmo.org> wrote:
> Hi Duane,
>    thanks for your message: I found it is a very interesting outsider's point of view.
>
> I would just like to remark that what you point out is more along an "image"
> dimension, than a "substance" one.
>
> The world is full of exciting "modern" programming languages that change syntax
> and semantics every couple of months, or that force you to write zillions of
> "modern" unit tests just to make sure you did not mix integers with strings,
> while in the ML (and OCaml world) we just keep writing safe and elegant code
> since the 1980's.
>
> If you scratch a bit the surface, it's easy to see that a lof of the "new"
> exciting technology around is actually "has been", while the "old" technology
> underlying OCaml is actually "revolutionary".
>
> If you share this point of view, please come along and lend a hand, help
> us become more fashionable, and help OCaml get an "image" that better
> correspond to its great "substance"
>
> Cheers
>
> --
> Roberto
>
> P.S.: by the way, it's inria.fr, not infria.fr, or, in old technology
>       terms, s/infria/inria/g :-)
>
> On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 09:16:09AM -0600, Duane Johnson wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 8:40 AM, Gabriel Scherer <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. 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 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 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 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>
>> 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>
>>     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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>         --
>>         Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>>         https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>>         Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>>         Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> Roberto Di Cosmo
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Professeur (on leave at/detache a INRIA Roquencourt)
> IRIF                          E-mail : roberto@dicosmo.org
> Universite Paris Diderot         Web : http://www.dicosmo.org
> Case 7014                    Twitter : http://twitter.com/rdicosmo
> 5, Rue Thomas Mann
> F-75205 Paris Cedex 13 France
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Office location:
>
> Paris Diderot                       INRIA
>
> Bureau 3020 (3rd floor)             Bureau C123
> Batiment Sophie Germain             Batiment C
> 8 place Aurélie Nemours             2, Rue Simone Iff
> Tel: +33 1 57 27 92 20              Tel: +33 1 80 49 44 42
>
> Metro
>   Bibliotheque F. Mitterrand        Ligne 6: Dugommier
>   ligne 14/RER C                    Ligne 14/RER A: Gare de Lyon
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> GPG fingerprint 2931 20CE 3A5A 5390 98EC 8BFC FCCA C3BE 39CB 12D3
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs

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

[Roberto Di Cosmo]

Hi Yotam,
   I basically agree with you on this... my point is simply that it is a mistake
to evaluate a technology only based on how trendy the communication and
collaboration tools around it are: QWERTY keyboards are extremely trendy and
have a great community, yet they are a bad technology.

Unfortunately, the world *is* an unfair place, and it is definitely not enough
to actually have good technology, if one misses the proper communication and
collaboration tools, as well as the right packaging (pun intended).

That's why I found Douane's fresh external point of view on our beloved language
quite interesting, and I'm fully in line with the idea of bringing new, more
modern communication and collaboration tools into play to make sure OCaml will
not stay the Dvorak of programming languages.

--
Roberto

P.S.: there is also, of course, an issue of herding cats, and managing egos,
      but that's another story :-)

On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 12:25:58PM -0400, Yotam Barnoy wrote:
> Roberto, you make a good point, but I'd like to make the counterpoint
> that what you call 'image' is almost as important as, if not even more
> important, than what you call 'substance'.
>
<snip>
> 
> -Yotam
> 
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 11:33 AM, Roberto Di Cosmo <roberto@dicosmo.org> wrote:
> > Hi Duane,
> >    thanks for your message: I found it is a very interesting outsider's point of view.
> >
> > I would just like to remark that what you point out is more along an "image"
> > dimension, than a "substance" one.
> >
> > The world is full of exciting "modern" programming languages that change syntax
> > and semantics every couple of months, or that force you to write zillions of
> > "modern" unit tests just to make sure you did not mix integers with strings,
> > while in the ML (and OCaml world) we just keep writing safe and elegant code
> > since the 1980's.
> >
> > If you scratch a bit the surface, it's easy to see that a lof of the "new"
> > exciting technology around is actually "has been", while the "old" technology
> > underlying OCaml is actually "revolutionary".
> >
> > If you share this point of view, please come along and lend a hand, help
> > us become more fashionable, and help OCaml get an "image" that better
> > correspond to its great "substance"
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> > --
> > Roberto
> >
> > P.S.: by the way, it's inria.fr, not infria.fr, or, in old technology
> >       terms, s/infria/inria/g :-)
> >
> > On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 09:16:09AM -0600, Duane Johnson wrote:
> >>
> >> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 8:40 AM, Gabriel Scherer <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. 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 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 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 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>
> >> 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>
> >>     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
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>         --
> >>         Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> >>         https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> >>         Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> >>         Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> > --
> > Roberto Di Cosmo
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Professeur (on leave at/detache a INRIA Roquencourt)
> > IRIF                          E-mail : roberto@dicosmo.org
> > Universite Paris Diderot         Web : http://www.dicosmo.org
> > Case 7014                    Twitter : http://twitter.com/rdicosmo
> > 5, Rue Thomas Mann
> > F-75205 Paris Cedex 13 France
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Office location:
> >
> > Paris Diderot                       INRIA
> >
> > Bureau 3020 (3rd floor)             Bureau C123
> > Batiment Sophie Germain             Batiment C
> > 8 place Aurélie Nemours             2, Rue Simone Iff
> > Tel: +33 1 57 27 92 20              Tel: +33 1 80 49 44 42
> >
> > Metro
> >   Bibliotheque F. Mitterrand        Ligne 6: Dugommier
> >   ligne 14/RER C                    Ligne 14/RER A: Gare de Lyon
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------
> > GPG fingerprint 2931 20CE 3A5A 5390 98EC 8BFC FCCA C3BE 39CB 12D3
> >
> > --
> > Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> > https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> > Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> > Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs

-- 
Roberto Di Cosmo
 
------------------------------------------------------------------
Professeur (on leave at/detache a INRIA Roquencourt)
IRIF                          E-mail : roberto@dicosmo.org
Universite Paris Diderot         Web : http://www.dicosmo.org
Case 7014                    Twitter : http://twitter.com/rdicosmo         
5, Rue Thomas Mann       
F-75205 Paris Cedex 13 France  
------------------------------------------------------------------
Office location:

Paris Diderot	 		    INRIA
 
Bureau 3020 (3rd floor)             Bureau C123
Batiment Sophie Germain             Batiment C
8 place Aurélie Nemours             2, Rue Simone Iff
Tel: +33 1 57 27 92 20              Tel: +33 1 80 49 44 42 

Metro
  Bibliotheque F. Mitterrand        Ligne 6: Dugommier
  ligne 14/RER C                    Ligne 14/RER A: Gare de Lyon
------------------------------------------------------------------                                                 
GPG fingerprint 2931 20CE 3A5A 5390 98EC 8BFC FCCA C3BE 39CB 12D3                        

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

[Mohamed Iguernlala]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 9108 bytes --]

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
>
>
>
>
>
>
>         --
>         Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>         https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>         Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>         Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>
>
>


[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 15717 bytes --]

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

[Yotam Barnoy]

The mailing list is still off of inria.fr.
ocaml.org people, is there any way to move the mailing list domain?

Also, could someone with ocaml github permissions start a gitter.im
page for OCaml? It should be relatively painless.

-Yotam

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Mohamed Iguernlala
<iguer.auto@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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."
>
> 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>
> 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. 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 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 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 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>
> 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>
>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>>
>>
>
>

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

[Yotam Barnoy]

Alternatively, we could indeed just use google groups. It looks like
many projects use that.

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 1:02 PM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com> wrote:
> The mailing list is still off of inria.fr.
> ocaml.org people, is there any way to move the mailing list domain?
>
> Also, could someone with ocaml github permissions start a gitter.im
> page for OCaml? It should be relatively painless.
>
> -Yotam
>
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Mohamed Iguernlala
> <iguer.auto@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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."
>>
>> 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>
>> 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. 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 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 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 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>
>> 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>
>>> 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
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>>>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>>>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>>>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>>>
>>>
>>
>>

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

[Duane Johnson]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4846 bytes --]

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 11:02 AM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com> wrote:

> The mailing list is still off of inria.fr.
> ocaml.org people, is there any way to move the mailing list domain?
>
> Also, could someone with ocaml github permissions start a gitter.im
> page for OCaml? It should be relatively painless.
>

This would be great! A mailing list at ocaml.org OR google groups would
have been quite inviting for me.

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 10:54 AM, Mohamed Iguernlala <iguer.auto@gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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."
>
> 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.
>

I actually came through a link that put me at
https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/info/caml-list. I don't recall how I arrived
there (it wasn't by typing inria.fr into the browser). The ocaml.org site
looks great, btw! I wish I'd seen it first :)

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 9:33 AM, Roberto Di Cosmo <roberto@dicosmo.org>
wrote:

> I would just like to remark that what you point out is more along an
> "image"
> dimension, than a "substance" one.
>
> Yes, I agree. I came for the substance.


> The world is full of exciting "modern" programming languages that change
> syntax
> and semantics every couple of months, or that force you to write zillions
> of
> "modern" unit tests just to make sure you did not mix integers with
> strings,
> while in the ML (and OCaml world) we just keep writing safe and elegant
> code
> since the 1980's.
>

Ironically, I discovered OCaml a couple of weeks ago due to the Reason[1]
syntax that I'd heard about on news.ycombinator.com published about a month
ago. I decided to look again because it seemed to me that (a) someone was
actively "caring" about how a newcomer might experience the strange syntax
of OCaml, and trying to make it better, and (b) the Reason syntax actually
did look more understandable to me than what I'd superficially seen of
OCaml previously. Also, I discovered BuckleScript at around the same time,
and because I'm familiar with the Node (javascript) ecosystem, and because
BuckleScript produces readable javascript as output, my curiosity was
piqued.

[1] http://facebook.github.io/reason/


> If you scratch a bit the surface, it's easy to see that a lof of the "new"
> exciting technology around is actually "has been", while the "old"
> technology
> underlying OCaml is actually "revolutionary".
>

I completely agree. I've been working on Ruby and Javascript systems for
over a decade and I'm very familiar with the problems that come with
untyped, procedural, or object-oriented languages. OCaml is very appealing
from that perspective.

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 10:25 AM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com> wrote:

> It would be really nice for the mailing list to use the new ocaml.org
> domain, which should be the outward face of OCaml.
> Additionally, I think an official gitter.im page should be considered.
> Many people are afraid to express their every thought and question on
> the mailing list for fear of backlash or that they will be thought to
> be spamming (a very realistic assessment, I may add). Users are much
> more likely to communicate in a realtime chat environment like gitter.
> IRC is simply incompatible with today's world -- many people cannot
> access IRC from work, the logs aren't easily available etc as stated
> by Duane. As an additional idea, the neovim project was able to create
> a bridge between its IRC channel and its gitter.im page
> (https://gitter.im/neovim/neovim).
>
> Of course, the deeper tooling issues are with things like the build
> system. It's remarkable how easy it is in a language like Rust to
> build a project and pull down its dependencies. Of course Rust is a
> newcomer, which allowed it to avoid all the legacy issues we're
> suffering from. It's extremely unfortunate that we ended up with so
> many different build systems, not to mention multiple standard
> libraries.
>

You've pointed out precisely what has made adoption difficult for me--I
experience a lot of uncertainty right now while trying to "commit" to a
standard library that, by definition of being so new in the OCaml
ecosystem, I have no way of knowing how to judge what to commit to. I hope
that the Reason folks choose a build system and standard library path--and
mark it brightly--so that those who follow can experience more certainty in
knowing, as newcomers, that they are in good hands and that their effort
toward learning the language will be rewarded.

Duane

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

[Kakadu]

This idea about gitter to IRC bridge looks very interesting. Actually
some ports are blocked in my office and I'm using freenode web
interface for IRCing and I do not like this interface (it is awful).

Kakadu

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 8:09 PM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com> wrote:
> Alternatively, we could indeed just use google groups. It looks like
> many projects use that.
>
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 1:02 PM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The mailing list is still off of inria.fr.
>> ocaml.org people, is there any way to move the mailing list domain?
>>
>> Also, could someone with ocaml github permissions start a gitter.im
>> page for OCaml? It should be relatively painless.
>>
>> -Yotam
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Mohamed Iguernlala
>> <iguer.auto@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 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."
>>>
>>> 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>
>>> 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. 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 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 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 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>
>>> 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>
>>>> 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
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>>>>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>>>>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>>>>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs

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

[Dean Thompson]

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Great comments from lots of people.

I am in the mobile app business, so I find myself thinking about this as a conversion funnel:

(1) Some number of people will hear enticing things about OCaml. So Gabriel Scherer’s point is important:

> 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.


(2) Once someone realizes OCaml is enticing, they will poke around the web to see what the community looks like. We want to maximize the percentage who decide the community looks solid enough for them to invest effort in learning OCaml. So Duane Johnson’s point, for example, is important:

> 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". 


(3) Once someone decides the community is solid enough for their purposes, they begin learning. We want to maximize the percentage who have sufficient positive experiences that they decide to persevere. So, for example, Gabriel Scherer makes additional important points:

> 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 (make or ocamlbuild for example), oasis, Merlin, opam, and get them to learn either Vim or Emacs.


(4) Further along in the learning process, Hendrik Boom’s points on an earlier thread (for example) are important:

> That's the hurdle I face whenever I program in OCaml — figuring out which libraries are usable, and which are actually documented. Not documented in the sense that someone has written an API guide and a tutorial, but documented in the sense that it is actually possible to find them.
> 
> There are often multiple packages to accomplish a single task. You don't know which one to use.

On the more encouraging side, we also have this from Gabriel Scherer on the earlier thread:

> a large part of the problem is rather of the "death by thousand cuts" kind: small things that add up to create an overall unpleasant experience. This portion of the general problem is both too large for a single person to fix (no one person can guess all use-cases), it is easily amenable to crowd-fixing: reporting and/or fixing issues one at a time as you discover them.

Is it possible we should be organizing ourselves to map the main flows of the beginner experience, identify the most severe cuts along those flows, and systematically address them? We could start with cheap solutions, like FAQs, and work our way to engineering fixes.

Dean

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

[Yotam Barnoy]

Thank you so much for starting this discussion, Dean. I started
reading this with my 'cynical glasses' on, and have disposed of them
along the way.

As one first step, it would be really nice to get more channels of
discussion going, with faster iteration of ideas. We need to increase
bandwidth so that even people who are not at the stage of commenting
on PRs can contribute, and the best way I can think of for that is
gitter.im channel(s).

The keys are in the hands of those people who have github permissions
to the OCaml organization. Could we please create an ocaml/ocaml
gitter.im room, and perhaps an ocaml/ocamlbuild room as well? If it
turns out to be an abject failure, we can always shut them down later.

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 1:41 PM, Dean Thompson
<deansherthompson@gmail.com> wrote:
> Great comments from lots of people.
>
> I am in the mobile app business, so I find myself thinking about this as a
> conversion funnel:
>
> (1) Some number of people will hear enticing things about OCaml. So Gabriel
> Scherer’s point is important:
>
> 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.
>
>
> (2) Once someone realizes OCaml is enticing, they will poke around the web
> to see what the community looks like. We want to maximize the percentage who
> decide the community looks solid enough for them to invest effort in
> learning OCaml. So Duane Johnson’s point, for example, is important:
>
> 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".
>
>
> (3) Once someone decides the community is solid enough for their purposes,
> they begin learning. We want to maximize the percentage who have sufficient
> positive experiences that they decide to persevere. So, for example, Gabriel
> Scherer makes additional important points:
>
> 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 (make
> or ocamlbuild for example), oasis, Merlin, opam, and get them to learn
> either Vim or Emacs.
>
>
> (4) Further along in the learning process, Hendrik Boom’s points on an
> earlier thread (for example) are important:
>
> That's the hurdle I face whenever I program in OCaml — figuring out which
> libraries are usable, and which are actually documented. Not documented in
> the sense that someone has written an API guide and a tutorial, but
> documented in the sense that it is actually possible to find them.
>
> There are often multiple packages to accomplish a single task. You don't
> know which one to use.
>
>
> On the more encouraging side, we also have this from Gabriel Scherer on the
> earlier thread:
>
> a large part of the problem is rather of the "death by thousand cuts" kind:
> small things that add up to create an overall unpleasant experience. This
> portion of the general problem is both too large for a single person to fix
> (no one person can guess all use-cases), it is easily amenable to
> crowd-fixing: reporting and/or fixing issues one at a time as you discover
> them.
>
>
> Is it possible we should be organizing ourselves to map the main flows of
> the beginner experience, identify the most severe cuts along those flows,
> and systematically address them? We could start with cheap solutions, like
> FAQs, and work our way to engineering fixes.
>
> Dean

[Caml-list] Getting the word out.

[Hendrik Boom]

On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 09:16:09AM -0600, Duane Johnson wrote:

> 
> 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.

Is this mailing list mirrored on gmane?  If so, what it is called 
there.  If not, it should be.  I find a newsreader is far the most 
convenient way to read a maling list.

-- hendrik

Re: [Caml-list] Getting the word out.

[moosotc]

Hendrik Boom <hendrik@topoi.pooq.com> writes:

> On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 09:16:09AM -0600, Duane Johnson wrote:
>
>> 
>> 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.
>
> Is this mailing list mirrored on gmane?  If so, what it is called 
> there.  If not, it should be.  I find a newsreader is far the most 
> convenient way to read a maling list.
>

gmane.comp.lang.caml.inria

-- 
mailto:moosotc@gmail.com

Re: [Caml-list] Getting the word out.

[Steven Shaw]

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http://gmane.org/info.php?group=gmane.comp.lang.caml.inria

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Re: [Caml-list] Getting the word out.

[Duane Johnson]

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On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 2:57 PM, Steven Shaw <steven@steshaw.org> wrote:

> http://gmane.org/info.php?group=gmane.comp.lang.caml.inria



Perhaps this explains why searching for "ocaml" on google groups does not
yield this list as a result? ("ocaml" is not a substring of "caml")

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

[SP]

On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 10:40:41AM -0400, Gabriel Scherer wrote:
>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.

+1

To my limited knowledge there is nothing wrong with the capability of
these tools. But making their entry point easier might improve adoption
as well as general usability.

>I would personally be interested in helping someone with a holistic
>approach to usability devote as much of their time as they can.

I'd try to contribute towards that too.

-- 
    SP

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

[SP]

On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 09:16:09AM -0600, Duane Johnson wrote:
>- my first impression of OCaml community was through reddit.com/r/ocaml. [..]
>- next, I tried to find a google group. [..]
>- 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.

Those are very noisy environments and rather unpractical mediums. I use
reddit to kill time not be productive. Sure exposure there might pull
more wondering people. I get the impression that is hardly on anyone's
top list here.

>- I looked for a chat community, and IRC is the only option. This signals
>"old tech community" to me. Slack or gitter.im is a more inclusive, modern
>community. In order to participate in IRC, one must always be connected.

Understood and appreciated. But the merrits of IRC and the mailing list
are still there. Give them some time to see them. Less glitter, but more
distributed and more accessible for people taking this seriously. Slack
and Gitter are proprietary systems... Just sharing with you the
perspective from the other side. Look past the chrome.

-- 
    SP

Re: [Caml-list] Getting the word out.

[SP]

On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 03:16:19PM -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote:
>Is this mailing list mirrored on gmane?  If so, what it is called
>there.  If not, it should be.  I find a newsreader is far the most
>convenient way to read a maling list.

In a quick search I found other OCaml related lists, like ctypes, which
is hosted by lists.ocaml.org.

-- 
    SP

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

[Robert Muller]

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As John McCarthy said, as far as programming language adoption goes, it
doesn't matter what professional programmers think. What matters is what 19
year-olds think. I've been teaching OCaml in my CS101 course for two years
now. Students have to choose between my OCaml-based course and the standard
one using Python. Getting them to opt for OCaml over the more
resume-friendly Python is a bit of a slog. But the ones who go for it wind
up really liking the OCaml approach to software and more than a few sign up
as CS students because of it.
That said, OCaml needs to be much, much easier to use. ocamlfind seems to
be a white flag of surrender.  Of course the lack of support for pedagogy
in the libraries is an issue too.
Cheers,
Bob Muller


On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 5:46 PM, SP <sp@orbitalfox.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 10:40:41AM -0400, Gabriel Scherer wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> +1
>
> To my limited knowledge there is nothing wrong with the capability of
> these tools. But making their entry point easier might improve adoption
> as well as general usability.
>
> I would personally be interested in helping someone with a holistic
>> approach to usability devote as much of their time as they can.
>>
>
> I'd try to contribute towards that too.
>
> --
>    SP
>
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>

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

[Fabrice Le Fessant]

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Yes, OCaml is an old programming language... It was still using SVN until
last year :-)

Anyway, I am not fond of the multiplication of communication channels, they
tend to divide an already small community into smaller groups, and it
becomes hard to remain up-to-date with latest information. For example, a
lot of discussions are now happening on Github pull-requests, either in
ocaml/ocaml or ocaml/opam-repository, and if you don't keep an eye on them,
you might soon discover that important decisions have been taken without
most of the community knowing it.

For the mailing-list, I think that hosting it on ocaml.org would be better,
with a simple name like "ocaml-users@ocaml.org <list@ocaml.org>", that
would be an alias for "ocaml-users@lists.ocaml.org <ocaml@lists.ocaml.org>".
I have no time to go on IRC, so I don't really care about it, but I think
that we miss something in the middle between mailing-lists and IRC, which
is a forum that would be hosted on ocaml.org (ocaml.org/forum ?). I used to
go on some BB forums at some point, I am pretty sure we could use something
like that, or one of its more recent clones (but not a proprietary
website). Such forums are quite practical, as you can both monitor them to
answer questions immediately (à la IRC) without filling your inbox, and
still be able to come from time to time and look at former discussions.

--Fabrice


On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 11:57 PM SP <sp@orbitalfox.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 09:16:09AM -0600, Duane Johnson wrote:
> >- my first impression of OCaml community was through reddit.com/r/ocaml.
> [..]
> >- next, I tried to find a google group. [..]
> >- 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.
>
> Those are very noisy environments and rather unpractical mediums. I use
> reddit to kill time not be productive. Sure exposure there might pull
> more wondering people. I get the impression that is hardly on anyone's
> top list here.
>
> >- I looked for a chat community, and IRC is the only option. This signals
> >"old tech community" to me. Slack or gitter.im is a more inclusive,
> modern
> >community. In order to participate in IRC, one must always be connected.
>
> Understood and appreciated. But the merrits of IRC and the mailing list
> are still there. Give them some time to see them. Less glitter, but more
> distributed and more accessible for people taking this seriously. Slack
> and Gitter are proprietary systems... Just sharing with you the
> perspective from the other side. Look past the chrome.
>
> --
>     SP
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>

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

[Duane Johnson]

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On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 4:18 PM, Fabrice Le Fessant <
Fabrice.Le_fessant@inria.fr> wrote:

> Anyway, I am not fond of the multiplication of communication channels,
> they tend to divide an already small community into smaller groups, and it
> becomes hard to remain up-to-date with latest information. For example, a
> lot of discussions are now happening on Github pull-requests, either in
> ocaml/ocaml or ocaml/opam-repository, and if you don't keep an eye on them,
> you might soon discover that important decisions have been taken without
> most of the community knowing it.


When Twitter first came out, I wondered how I was supposed to read
everything in my stream because I couldn't always tell where I'd left off
last time. Then I learned some people followed *hundreds* of other twitter
users (at that time I had only started following a handful) and I realized
something different was going on--this wasn't a medium where I could drink
in every tweet, it was a firehose and I could come get splashed here and
there when I wanted to :)

I think there's a place for less consequential announcements and
discussions in a community--especially a large one. Important information
will almost always reach critical mass and the network will distribute it
to every leaf node. A mailing list is a good solid place for discussion,
and every incoming message can be addressed up to a certain threshold--but
when it gets too popular, even the long-time participants start to complain
that there's too much noise.

When the Haskell mailing list experienced this kind of growth, there was
someone in the community who took it upon themselves to summarize the
important announcements, events, and projects that had taken place in the
past week. People could be assured that even if they weren't personally
reading each of 100 messages per day, there was still a way to be apprised
of the headline events.

Perhaps someone could do the same, as a bridge between the github and
caml-list groups.

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Re: [Caml-list] Getting the word out.

[Hendrik Boom]

On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 11:51:21PM +0300, moosotc@gmail.com wrote:
> Hendrik Boom <hendrik@topoi.pooq.com> writes:
> 
> > On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 09:16:09AM -0600, Duane Johnson wrote:
> >
> >> 
> >> 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.
> >
> > Is this mailing list mirrored on gmane?  If so, what it is called 
> > there.  If not, it should be.  I find a newsreader is far the most 
> > convenient way to read a maling list.
> >
> 
> gmane.comp.lang.caml.inria

Aha!  I failed to find it bcause I used the search string 'ocaml'.  
Should have known better, given the name of the list.
But I guess it's the kind of trap for beginners we're talking about 
here.

Thank you.

-- hendrik

Re: [Caml-list] Getting the word out.

[Yotam Barnoy]

No -- it doesn't exist on google groups.

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 5:13 PM, Duane Johnson <duane.johnson@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 2:57 PM, Steven Shaw <steven@steshaw.org> wrote:
>>
>> http://gmane.org/info.php?group=gmane.comp.lang.caml.inria
>
>
>
> Perhaps this explains why searching for "ocaml" on google groups does not
> yield this list as a result? ("ocaml" is not a substring of "caml")

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

[Yotam Barnoy]

1. If we can get google groups to synchronize with the list, we can
essentially get forum functionality out of the same source.

2. Regarding the concern that gitter.im is proprietary, there are
already tools to read the entire history out of it. I still think this
is the best, friendliest way to get everyone involved and
contributing/answering questions. Epecially if we can get the
gitter-irc bridge-bot up and running
(https://github.com/finnp/gitter-irc-bot), it means we'll have the
records in IRC but still get the user-friendliness of gitter.

PS. someone with access, please set up a gitter room -- OASIS has a
room, OPAM has an (unused) room on gitter:ocaml/opam, ocaml-http has
one -- it would be really nice to have a general ocaml/ocaml room.

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 6:39 PM, Duane Johnson <duane.johnson@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 4:18 PM, Fabrice Le Fessant
> <Fabrice.Le_fessant@inria.fr> wrote:
>>
>> Anyway, I am not fond of the multiplication of communication channels,
>> they tend to divide an already small community into smaller groups, and it
>> becomes hard to remain up-to-date with latest information. For example, a
>> lot of discussions are now happening on Github pull-requests, either in
>> ocaml/ocaml or ocaml/opam-repository, and if you don't keep an eye on them,
>> you might soon discover that important decisions have been taken without
>> most of the community knowing it.
>
>
> When Twitter first came out, I wondered how I was supposed to read
> everything in my stream because I couldn't always tell where I'd left off
> last time. Then I learned some people followed *hundreds* of other twitter
> users (at that time I had only started following a handful) and I realized
> something different was going on--this wasn't a medium where I could drink
> in every tweet, it was a firehose and I could come get splashed here and
> there when I wanted to :)
>
> I think there's a place for less consequential announcements and discussions
> in a community--especially a large one. Important information will almost
> always reach critical mass and the network will distribute it to every leaf
> node. A mailing list is a good solid place for discussion, and every
> incoming message can be addressed up to a certain threshold--but when it
> gets too popular, even the long-time participants start to complain that
> there's too much noise.
>
> When the Haskell mailing list experienced this kind of growth, there was
> someone in the community who took it upon themselves to summarize the
> important announcements, events, and projects that had taken place in the
> past week. People could be assured that even if they weren't personally
> reading each of 100 messages per day, there was still a way to be apprised
> of the headline events.
>
> Perhaps someone could do the same, as a bridge between the github and
> caml-list groups.

Re: [Caml-list] Getting the word out.

[Duane Johnson]

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What are "fa.caml" and "ocaml-core"?

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/fa.caml
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ocaml-core

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 4:54 PM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com> wrote:

> No -- it doesn't exist on google groups.
>
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 5:13 PM, Duane Johnson <duane.johnson@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 2:57 PM, Steven Shaw <steven@steshaw.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> http://gmane.org/info.php?group=gmane.comp.lang.caml.inria
> >
> >
> >
> > Perhaps this explains why searching for "ocaml" on google groups does not
> > yield this list as a result? ("ocaml" is not a substring of "caml")
>

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

[Gerd Stolpmann]

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Well, the world is now much larger than at the time when McCarthy made
that observation. I wouldn't give too much on it, as long as some 19 yr
olds are smart enough to find OCaml (and like it).

That OCaml is not resume-friendly is a myth that still spreads in the
academic world. Actually, it is hard for companies to find OCaml
engineers (it is currently one of our search criteria), and I don't know
anyone who was unemployed for a longer time. I'd guess that the demand
for engineers is bigger than the supply. Of course, this might depend on
where you live, and for what kind of job you go, and getting the first
position in a certain field is never easy.

I don't really get the thing with the white flag...

Gerd

Am Freitag, den 08.07.2016, 18:05 -0400 schrieb Robert Muller:
> As John McCarthy said, as far as programming language adoption goes,
> it doesn't matter what professional programmers think. What matters is
> what 19 year-olds think. I've been teaching OCaml in my CS101 course
> for two years now. Students have to choose between my OCaml-based
> course and the standard one using Python. Getting them to opt for
> OCaml over the more resume-friendly Python is a bit of a slog. But the
> ones who go for it wind up really liking the OCaml approach to
> software and more than a few sign up as CS students because of it.
> That said, OCaml needs to be much, much easier to use. ocamlfind seems
> to be a white flag of surrender.  Of course the lack of support for
> pedagogy in the libraries is an issue too.
> Cheers,
> Bob Muller
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 5:46 PM, SP <sp@orbitalfox.com> wrote:
>         On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 10:40:41AM -0400, Gabriel Scherer
>         wrote:
>                 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.
>         
>         +1
>         
>         To my limited knowledge there is nothing wrong with the
>         capability of
>         these tools. But making their entry point easier might improve
>         adoption
>         as well as general usability.
>         
>                 I would personally be interested in helping someone
>                 with a holistic
>                 approach to usability devote as much of their time as
>                 they can.
>         
>         I'd try to contribute towards that too.
>         
>         -- 
>            SP
>         
>         
>         
> 
> 
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Gerd Stolpmann, Darmstadt, Germany    gerd@gerd-stolpmann.de
My OCaml site:          http://www.camlcity.org
Contact details:        http://www.camlcity.org/contact.html
Company homepage:       http://www.gerd-stolpmann.de
------------------------------------------------------------


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

[Markus Mottl]

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 7:11 PM, Gerd Stolpmann <info@gerd-stolpmann.de> wrote:
> That OCaml is not resume-friendly is a myth that still spreads in the
> academic world. Actually, it is hard for companies to find OCaml
> engineers (it is currently one of our search criteria), and I don't know
> anyone who was unemployed for a longer time. I'd guess that the demand
> for engineers is bigger than the supply. Of course, this might depend on
> where you live, and for what kind of job you go, and getting the first
> position in a certain field is never easy.

I agree that having OCaml experience on one's resume is not a bad
thing, but that's because it signals general programming competence.
There are plenty of shops that ask for FP experience, but on closer
examination just do that to filter out weaker candidates.  The vast
majority would still rather have you write C++ and Python.  It's
always hard to find good employees, just less so if you are an actual
FP shop.

A fairly obvious measure for the balance between supply and demand is
price.  E.g. the UK salary ranges in the following guide are probably
not too unrealistic:

  http://uk.hudson.com/Portals/UK/documents/SalarySurveys/SalaryTables_2016_UK_IT.pdf

As can be seen, functional programmers pay a heavy price for their
preferences (if they actually want to use an FPL) and that's not just
limited to monetary compensation.  If the above guide is of any
indication, they rank near the bottom (below even VBA and HTML5
developers).

It's a realistic assumption that money and status are significant
motivators for most students.  Having the choice between OCa-what? and
Python, they will quite rationally choose the latter, because it
promises an easier path to attaining their goals.

The more interesting question actually is why the supply side is so weak.

Regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Mottl        http://www.ocaml.info        markus.mottl@gmail.com

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

[Armaël Guéneau]

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Le 09/07/2016 à 00:18, Fabrice Le Fessant a écrit :
> I have no time to go on IRC, so I don't really care about it, but I think that > we miss something in the middle between mailing-lists and IRC, which is a > forum that would be hosted on ocaml.org (ocaml.org/forum ?). I used to go on > some BB forums at some point, I am pretty sure we could use something like > that, or one of its more recent clones (but not a proprietary website). Such > forums are quite practical, as you can both monitor them to answer questions > immediately (à la IRC) without filling your inbox, and still be able to come > from time to time and look at former discussions.

If there has to be something other than IRC and the mailing list, I personnally
quite like the idea of a forum. The *BB things sure have an old-school
look&feel, but discourse [1] looks nice, for example, and I think the rust
people use it for their user forum [2] (and it is free software).

I personnaly would be happy to help newcomers on such a forum. I'm also not so
fond of IRC-like mediums: the density of useful and actual content is usually
quite low (because of the informal aspect of the discussions), and not
structured or easily searchable. It's not because you have access to the 500k+
lines of backlog that the informations there are actually usable.

— Armaël

[1]: https://www.discourse.org/
[2]: https://users.rust-lang.org/

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Re: [Caml-list] Getting the word out.

[Ashish Agarwal]

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On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 7:11 PM, Duane Johnson <duane.johnson@gmail.com>
wrote:

> What are "fa.caml"
>

See discussion here: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml.org/issues/699. We
welcome a resolution and pull request from anyone.



> and "ocaml-core"?
>

This is a mailing list to discuss Jane Street's suite of libraries. A large
subset of that is know as "Core".




>
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 4:54 PM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> No -- it doesn't exist on google groups.
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 5:13 PM, Duane Johnson <duane.johnson@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 2:57 PM, Steven Shaw <steven@steshaw.org> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> http://gmane.org/info.php?group=gmane.comp.lang.caml.inria
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Perhaps this explains why searching for "ocaml" on google groups does
>> not
>> > yield this list as a result? ("ocaml" is not a substring of "caml")
>>
>
>

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

[Dean Thompson]

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> On Jul 9, 2016, at 9:03 AM, Armaël Guéneau <armael.gueneau@ens-lyon.fr> wrote:
> 
> If there has to be something other than IRC and the mailing list, I personnally
> quite like the idea of a forum. The *BB things sure have an old-school
> look&feel, but discourse [1] looks nice, for example, and I think the rust
> people use it for their user forum [2] (and it is free software).
> [1]: https://www.discourse.org/ <https://www.discourse.org/>
> [2]: https://users.rust-lang.org/ <https://users.rust-lang.org/>
A while back, I went looking for good BB/forum software that might help with large-group collaboration, and Discourse stood out for me. I like their theme of "Civilized Discussion”, which appears to me to go far deeper than just marketing — they really do seem to shape their user experience to facilitate/motivate constructive discussion. The Discourse user experience felt pleasant and comfortable to me. I like the fact that Discourse is broadly customizable through plugins. I like that it is a 20,000-commit open-source GitHub project. Bummer that it isn’t in OCaml :-).

But there’s at least one con: Discourse is not nearly as well established or widely known as some other alternatives, so might be less appealing to casual participants.

If we got some level of consensus among those interested in this topic that Discourse were worth a try, I would volunteer to host, set up, and administer a Discourse instance that was partly a new venue for OCaml beginners to seek help and partly a venue for coordinating work to foster OCaml adoption.

But as we think about whether that consensus exists, we should consider many risks. It would be terrible if this merely further fragmented a small community. We would need to carefully understand whether our community leaders were supportive of this move. More specifically, I think it would be wrong to conclude we had sufficient consensus unless that consensus included a respectable quorum of OCaml community leaders. We would also need to carefully think through integration with existing venues, such as whether we could/should host this on an ocaml.org subdomain.

Or perhaps we reach a consensus on some very different approach instead.

Dean


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

[Ashish Agarwal]

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On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 1:02 PM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com> wrote:

Also, could someone with ocaml github permissions start a gitter.im
> page for OCaml? It should be relatively painless.
>

Can you explain what needs to be done exactly. When I'm logged in, I see
nothing at gitter.im/ocaml and when I'm logged out I see links for
ocaml/oasis and ocaml/opam. So something already works.



On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Mohamed Iguernlala
> <iguer.auto@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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."
> >
> > 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>
> > 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.
> 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 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
> 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 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>
> > 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>
> >> 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
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> >>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> >>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> >>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>

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

[Gabriel Scherer]

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Dean Thompson wrote:

> But there’s at least one con: Discourse is not nearly as well established
> or widely known as some other alternatives, so might be less appealing to
> casual participants.
>

Yeah, mailing-lists and IRC channels are rather more established.

I hear very bad things about Slack for large communities -- it seems to be
intended for tight-knit teams inside a single organization:

https://medium.freecodecamp.com/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-we-deeply-regretted-it-391bcc714c81#.2ow2y1lcb
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9754626

It's pretty clear that Slack is not, and never will be, built for this
> use-case. Slack is for *teams*: small groups where everyone knows
> one-another by name, can be trusted with one-another's email-addresses and
> other contact information, can be trusted to only use @everyone triggers
> for important things, etc. A lot of Slack's features are built to assume
> this "small group with a shared purpose where everyone can be trusted to
> fiddle with things" paradigm.

The only feedback I could get from gitter.im is "it spams my mailbox
constantly", not exactly high praise. I'm sure it's a good tools for
people, but the fact that it is a proprietary tool built by a for-profit
company is giving me pause.

In general I support the idea of "meeting the users where they are" even
when that mean displeasing technological choices; this is why I have been
active answering OCaml questions on StackOverflow in the past. I would be
interested in making experiments with either:

- Discourse: I also heard bad things about it, but it's shiny, reactive and
open source

- Mattermost, as an open-source alternative to Slack -- but we would need
to find someone willing to host an instance.

On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 9:46 AM, Ashish Agarwal <agarwal1975@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 1:02 PM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Also, could someone with ocaml github permissions start a gitter.im
>> page for OCaml? It should be relatively painless.
>>
>
> Can you explain what needs to be done exactly. When I'm logged in, I see
> nothing at gitter.im/ocaml and when I'm logged out I see links for
> ocaml/oasis and ocaml/opam. So something already works.
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Mohamed Iguernlala
>> <iguer.auto@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > 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."
>> >
>> > 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>
>> > 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.
>> 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 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
>> 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 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>
>> > 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>
>> >> 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
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>> --
>> >>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>> >>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>> >>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>> >>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>> >>
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>>
>> --
>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>>
>
>

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

[Dean Thompson]

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> On Jul 9, 2016, at 9:51 AM, Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> In general I support the idea of "meeting the users where they are" even when that mean displeasing technological choices; this is why I have been active answering OCaml questions on StackOverflow in the past. I would be interested in making experiments with either:
> - Discourse: I also heard bad things about it, but it's shiny, reactive and open source
> 
> - Mattermost, as an open-source alternative to Slack -- but we would need to find someone willing to host an instance.
> 
Mattermost is very appealing, but seems strongly focused on team/enterprise communication rather than public venues.

But there’s a rather funny punchline: On www.mattermost.org, they have a Community menu, which has a Community Forums item, which links to … wait for it! … a Discourse forum (forum.mattermost.org).

Dean

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

[Duane Johnson]

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Elm has been very successful at encouraging adoption of late. Here is what
their Community page looks like:

http://elm-lang.org/community

On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 8:13 AM, Dean Thompson <deansherthompson@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Jul 9, 2016, at 9:51 AM, Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> In general I support the idea of "meeting the users where they are" even
> when that mean displeasing technological choices; this is why I have been
> active answering OCaml questions on StackOverflow in the past. I would be
> interested in making experiments with either:
>
> - Discourse: I also heard bad things about it, but it's shiny, reactive
> and open source
>
> - Mattermost, as an open-source alternative to Slack -- but we would need
> to find someone willing to host an instance.
>
> Mattermost is very appealing, but seems strongly focused on
> team/enterprise communication rather than public venues.
>
> But there’s a rather funny punchline: On www.mattermost.org, they have a
> Community menu, which has a Community Forums item, which links to … wait
> for it! … a Discourse forum (forum.mattermost.org).
>
> Dean
>

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

[Yaron Minsky]

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I would take that study with a rather large grain of salt. The validity of
such studies depends enormously on the details of how the data was
gathered, and without digging into those details, I'm not sure it's much
more than noise, especially because the thing being measured (functional
programming jobs in industry) is quite small, and not a major part of the
survey. I don't know that one should trust this any more than one does the
TIOBE survey of programming language popularity.

My own experience points in the opposite direction of the data listed in
the study. It seems pretty clear from our experience in the hiring market
that people with OCaml in their background are in high demand, and that the
places that do hire people to program in OCaml itself need to pay good
money to be competitive. I know Jane Street pays quite well, and I suspect
that Bloomberg and Facebook are also compensating their OCaml-wielding
employees in a competitive fashion as well. Also, from what I know from the
banks that hire FP types (a lot of it in Haskell), the compensation their
is pretty solid as well.

y

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 6:37 PM, Markus Mottl <markus.mottl@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 7:11 PM, Gerd Stolpmann <info@gerd-stolpmann.de>
> wrote:
> > That OCaml is not resume-friendly is a myth that still spreads in the
> > academic world. Actually, it is hard for companies to find OCaml
> > engineers (it is currently one of our search criteria), and I don't know
> > anyone who was unemployed for a longer time. I'd guess that the demand
> > for engineers is bigger than the supply. Of course, this might depend on
> > where you live, and for what kind of job you go, and getting the first
> > position in a certain field is never easy.
>
> I agree that having OCaml experience on one's resume is not a bad
> thing, but that's because it signals general programming competence.
> There are plenty of shops that ask for FP experience, but on closer
> examination just do that to filter out weaker candidates.  The vast
> majority would still rather have you write C++ and Python.  It's
> always hard to find good employees, just less so if you are an actual
> FP shop.
>
> A fairly obvious measure for the balance between supply and demand is
> price.  E.g. the UK salary ranges in the following guide are probably
> not too unrealistic:
>
>
> http://uk.hudson.com/Portals/UK/documents/SalarySurveys/SalaryTables_2016_UK_IT.pdf
>
> As can be seen, functional programmers pay a heavy price for their
> preferences (if they actually want to use an FPL) and that's not just
> limited to monetary compensation.  If the above guide is of any
> indication, they rank near the bottom (below even VBA and HTML5
> developers).
>
> It's a realistic assumption that money and status are significant
> motivators for most students.  Having the choice between OCa-what? and
> Python, they will quite rationally choose the latter, because it
> promises an easier path to attaining their goals.
>
> The more interesting question actually is why the supply side is so weak.
>
> Regards,
> Markus
>
> --
> Markus Mottl        http://www.ocaml.info        markus.mottl@gmail.com
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>

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

[Yotam Barnoy]

If you go to gitter's home page (https://gitter.im/home#) and choose
create, you should be able to create a room for the ocaml repository.

-Yotam

On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 9:46 AM, Ashish Agarwal <agarwal1975@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 1:02 PM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Also, could someone with ocaml github permissions start a gitter.im
>> page for OCaml? It should be relatively painless.
>
>
> Can you explain what needs to be done exactly. When I'm logged in, I see
> nothing at gitter.im/ocaml and when I'm logged out I see links for
> ocaml/oasis and ocaml/opam. So something already works.
>
>
>
>> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Mohamed Iguernlala
>> <iguer.auto@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > 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."
>> >
>> > 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>
>> > 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.
>> > 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 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
>> > 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 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>
>> > 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>
>> >> 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
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>> --
>> >>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>> >>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>> >>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>> >>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>> >>
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>>
>> --
>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>
>

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

[Yotam Barnoy]

gitter.im is easy to mute for a particular room, if it gets too high
volume. There's a mobile app and an OSX app, so it's easy to monitor
discussions from anywhere. You can also download the entire history
via user-made open source tools, so being closed-source isn't much of
a problem.

It's also worth thinking about some of the use-cases for communication channels:

1. New users who want to just learn about the language's ideas
2. New users actively learning OCaml and needing assistance
3. Experienced users who want to discuss OCaml knowledge, techniques, theory etc
4. Users wanting to discuss improving the OCaml platform as a whole
(website, build tools, stdlib etc)
5. Questions about the OCaml compiler/language design
6. OCaml compiler devs discussing new language proposals and compiler features.

All of these use-cases (and especially 1 and 2) could benefit from a
high-frequency channel. This is what IRC is for, but it's simply
inadequate IMO compared to something like gitter: old tech, no easy
access, limited accessibility from workplaces.

Considering forums, I do think that mailing lists tend to have too
high a barrier of entry for use (sending questions into the void, fear
of harsh feedback etc), and they exclude visible, easily available
examples (unlike forums). At the same time, forums tend not to
advertise and forward every single thread that was created -- the user
must express interest in a specific thread before receiving
notifications about that thread, and even then, the notification
usually just reminds the user to check back on the thread itself at
the forum. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage, making forums
a good fit for anything but 6. A forum would contain deeper, more
long-lasting discussions than gitter/IRC about anything that shouldn't
be worth bothering every single member of the community about unless
they're specifically interested in it. This would have the added
advantage of reducing the volume of mailing list messages, allowing
more people to focus on what's truly important.

What would be really nice would be to have forums that automatically
collate the output of the mailing list under a specific section (the
mailing list being considered the essential topics of discussion). I
don't know if this is possible, but it would be the ideal forum IMO.
It would mean that to view any long-term discussion, one need only
check the forums, viewing both the less essential (general) topics and
the more essential (mailing-list) topics.

BTW reddit is a pretty vacuous place in my experience, brandishing the
blunt weapon of community upvotes or downvotes, and unable to focus on
anything other than the latest news item. Other than advertising and
presence, it presents almost no benefit whatsoever IMO.

-Yotam

On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 9:51 AM, Gabriel Scherer
<gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dean Thompson wrote:
>>
>> But there’s at least one con: Discourse is not nearly as well established
>> or widely known as some other alternatives, so might be less appealing to
>> casual participants.
>
>
> Yeah, mailing-lists and IRC channels are rather more established.
>
> I hear very bad things about Slack for large communities -- it seems to be
> intended for tight-knit teams inside a single organization:
>
> https://medium.freecodecamp.com/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-we-deeply-regretted-it-391bcc714c81#.2ow2y1lcb
>   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9754626
>
>> It's pretty clear that Slack is not, and never will be, built for this
>> use-case. Slack is for teams: small groups where everyone knows one-another
>> by name, can be trusted with one-another's email-addresses and other contact
>> information, can be trusted to only use @everyone triggers for important
>> things, etc. A lot of Slack's features are built to assume this "small group
>> with a shared purpose where everyone can be trusted to fiddle with things"
>> paradigm.
>
> The only feedback I could get from gitter.im is "it spams my mailbox
> constantly", not exactly high praise. I'm sure it's a good tools for people,
> but the fact that it is a proprietary tool built by a for-profit company is
> giving me pause.
>
> In general I support the idea of "meeting the users where they are" even
> when that mean displeasing technological choices; this is why I have been
> active answering OCaml questions on StackOverflow in the past. I would be
> interested in making experiments with either:
>
> - Discourse: I also heard bad things about it, but it's shiny, reactive and
> open source
>
> - Mattermost, as an open-source alternative to Slack -- but we would need to
> find someone willing to host an instance.
>
>
> On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 9:46 AM, Ashish Agarwal <agarwal1975@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 1:02 PM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Also, could someone with ocaml github permissions start a gitter.im
>>> page for OCaml? It should be relatively painless.
>>
>>
>> Can you explain what needs to be done exactly. When I'm logged in, I see
>> nothing at gitter.im/ocaml and when I'm logged out I see links for
>> ocaml/oasis and ocaml/opam. So something already works.
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Mohamed Iguernlala
>>> <iguer.auto@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > 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."
>>> >
>>> > 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>
>>> > 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. 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 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
>>> > 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 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>
>>> > 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>
>>> >> 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
>>> >>>
>>> >>>
>>> >>>
>>> >>>
>>> >>>
>>> >>>
>>> >>> --
>>> >>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>>> >>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>>> >>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>>> >>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>>> >>
>>> >>
>>> >
>>> >
>>>
>>> --
>>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>>
>>
>

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

[Gabriel Scherer]

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On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 1:29 PM, Duane Johnson <duane.johnson@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Elm has been very successful at encouraging adoption of late. Here is what
> their Community page looks like: http://elm-lang.org/community


Very nice! One result of this discussion I would like to see is a series of
improvements on our own ocaml.org community page:

  http://ocaml.org/community/

One of the criticisms of IRC channels in this discussion is that (1)
they're supposedly hard to access from some companies and (2) they don't
have archives. We could have on this page a mention of the IRC channel,
with points to
  - channel archives, for example
    http://irclog.whitequark.org/ocaml/
  - a web gateway for IRC; I haven't tried it but I was told that
    https://vector.im/beta/#/room/#freenode_#ocaml:matrix.org
    is nice

ocaml.org is a community-maintained resource, so anyone can improve it by
sending a pull request. I'll try to send one for the IRC thing shortly, but
I thought people of the list could have additional suggestions for
improvements.

On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 1:29 PM, Duane Johnson <duane.johnson@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Elm has been very successful at encouraging adoption of late. Here is what
> their Community page looks like:
>
> http://elm-lang.org/community
>
> On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 8:13 AM, Dean Thompson <deansherthompson@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Jul 9, 2016, at 9:51 AM, Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> In general I support the idea of "meeting the users where they are" even
>> when that mean displeasing technological choices; this is why I have been
>> active answering OCaml questions on StackOverflow in the past. I would be
>> interested in making experiments with either:
>>
>> - Discourse: I also heard bad things about it, but it's shiny, reactive
>> and open source
>>
>> - Mattermost, as an open-source alternative to Slack -- but we would need
>> to find someone willing to host an instance.
>>
>> Mattermost is very appealing, but seems strongly focused on
>> team/enterprise communication rather than public venues.
>>
>> But there’s a rather funny punchline: On www.mattermost.org, they have a
>> Community menu, which has a Community Forums item, which links to … wait
>> for it! … a Discourse forum (forum.mattermost.org).
>>
>> Dean
>>
>
>

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

[Yotam Barnoy]

On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 10:03 AM, Gabriel Scherer
<gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> wrote:
> https://vector.im/beta/#/room/#freenode_#ocaml:matrix.org

How about we try to open a gitter room for ocaml/ocaml, and see how it
does? My hunch is that it'll do a lot better than IRC for many
reasons, but I could be wrong.

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

[Jesse Haber-Kucharsky]

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I think a Gitter room could be a great experiment, especially since OCaml
is hosted on GitHub.

I have seen the Gitter rooms for projects in the Scala ecosystem like
Shapeless and Cats become vibrant and helpful spaces, and chat rooms have
fewer psychological barriers to entry than mailing lists.

On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 10:25 AM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 10:03 AM, Gabriel Scherer
> <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> wrote:
> > https://vector.im/beta/#/room/#freenode_#ocaml:matrix.org
>
> How about we try to open a gitter room for ocaml/ocaml, and see how it
> does? My hunch is that it'll do a lot better than IRC for many
> reasons, but I could be wrong.
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>

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

[Gabriel Scherer]

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I'm personally not enthusiastic about real-time synchronous messaging (for
the already mentioned reason that it does not produced structured, reusable
content), and I think it would be nice to gather the opinion of the people
that populate the IRC channel today.
(Plus gitter.im is a proprietary, for-profit platform, meh.)

Yotam, would you be willing to go on IRC and have a chat about a gitter.im
room with the chan, to see what they think?

It would also be nice to have a gitter/IRC bridge (I hear that this
exists). Who would be volunteering to take care of the gitter stuff and
make sure that the bridge works properly?

On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 10:29 AM, Jesse Haber-Kucharsky <
jesse@haberkucharsky.com> wrote:

> I think a Gitter room could be a great experiment, especially since OCaml
> is hosted on GitHub.
>
> I have seen the Gitter rooms for projects in the Scala ecosystem like
> Shapeless and Cats become vibrant and helpful spaces, and chat rooms have
> fewer psychological barriers to entry than mailing lists.
>
> On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 10:25 AM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 10:03 AM, Gabriel Scherer
>> <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > https://vector.im/beta/#/room/#freenode_#ocaml:matrix.org
>>
>> How about we try to open a gitter room for ocaml/ocaml, and see how it
>> does? My hunch is that it'll do a lot better than IRC for many
>> reasons, but I could be wrong.
>>
>> --
>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>>
>
>

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

[Yotam Barnoy]

As I mentioned above,
a. the neovim project has already made heavy use of a gitter/IRC
translation bot (bridge) at https://github.com/finnp/gitter-irc-bot
and
b. there are tools to scrape gitter history in existence, making the
fact that they're proprietary fairly irrelevant.

The bot requires a server on which to run and github credentials for
the project.

As a response to your comment about real-time messaging, I think
there's space for different styles of communication. Sometimes you
don't want structured discussions. This is especially true for
newbies, but sometimes everyone wants a low-latency discussion where
not every sentence counts. I've found gitter to be ideal for this,
much more so than IRC (which has a high barrier-of-entry).

I'll enquire on IRC (just connecting requires me using an annoying
service like IRCCloud, which shows the problem -- I can't even post
the question and get a notification about a response.), but people
using the status quo tend to favor the status quo, so my hopes aren't
so high.

Creating the gitter room is effortless, so I recommend doing it
regardless as an experiment. Worst case, we don't advertise it, and
shut it down later on.

On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 10:34 AM, Gabriel Scherer
<gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm personally not enthusiastic about real-time synchronous messaging (for
> the already mentioned reason that it does not produced structured, reusable
> content), and I think it would be nice to gather the opinion of the people
> that populate the IRC channel today.
> (Plus gitter.im is a proprietary, for-profit platform, meh.)
>
> Yotam, would you be willing to go on IRC and have a chat about a gitter.im
> room with the chan, to see what they think?
>
> It would also be nice to have a gitter/IRC bridge (I hear that this exists).
> Who would be volunteering to take care of the gitter stuff and make sure
> that the bridge works properly?
>
> On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 10:29 AM, Jesse Haber-Kucharsky
> <jesse@haberkucharsky.com> wrote:
>>
>> I think a Gitter room could be a great experiment, especially since OCaml
>> is hosted on GitHub.
>>
>> I have seen the Gitter rooms for projects in the Scala ecosystem like
>> Shapeless and Cats become vibrant and helpful spaces, and chat rooms have
>> fewer psychological barriers to entry than mailing lists.
>>
>> On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 10:25 AM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 10:03 AM, Gabriel Scherer
>>> <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > https://vector.im/beta/#/room/#freenode_#ocaml:matrix.org
>>>
>>> How about we try to open a gitter room for ocaml/ocaml, and see how it
>>> does? My hunch is that it'll do a lot better than IRC for many
>>> reasons, but I could be wrong.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
>>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>>
>>
>

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

[Glen Mével]

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Yotam Barnoy a écrit (le 10/07/2016 à 16:47) :

> […] I've found gitter to be ideal for this, much more so than IRC
> (which has a high barrier-of-entry).

what is so complicated about using the web interface to IRC [1] ?

what about the barrier‐of‐entry to that gitter? i’ve never heard of it
before and i’m not sure what’s so new there (apart from the built‐in
persistence), but as i understood, it is a github service so it would
require a github account (and to accept to be publicly linked to that
github account, and to rely on proprietary solutions, etc·), whereas IRC
requires nothing.

> I'll enquire on IRC (just connecting requires me using an annoying
> service like IRCCloud, which shows the problem -- I can't even post
> the question and get a notification about a response.)

at least the web interface mentionned above does notify you, and even
plays a sound iirc. if you are not served within the hour and want to
stay 24 hours a day to finally see your answer, then structured forums
are better fit to your use than messy instant messaging anyway.

-- 
Glen Mével

[1]: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#ocaml

p·s·:

> b. there are tools to scrape gitter history in existence, making the
> fact that they're proprietary fairly irrelevant.

the point about proprietary systems is not a mere matter of retrieving
history…


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

[Yotam Barnoy]

I just asked on the neovim gitter, and the service they use to bridge
with IRC is this one:
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-gitter

Every aspiring programmer has a github account at this point. It's
just reality. Even without one, you get to view gitter chat in
realtime. IRC requires a bunch of extra arcane knowledge that most
beginners aren't willing to learn, to a large degree because IRC is
simply not being used actively anymore.

Listen -- you can always dismiss features, and like I said,
programmers tend to believe that what they use is the best and
everything new or different is unnecessary. I get it -- I think like
that automatically as well. I think we have to look beyond that --
many of the advantages of new technologies seem minor but they add up.
People were giving the same kinds of rebuttals to moving to github
before that move was made (though I don't think the improvement will
be anywhere near that delta).

Perhaps the key thing to grasp here is this: we're competing with
other languages and ecosystems for programmers. We need to be as
attractive as possible. This competitiveness must take into account
knowledge of the current tools and the impressions they leave on
users. As soon as there's a hurdle in the way, many potential
newcomers will be lost. The additional benefits to existing community
members are there as well, but they're harder to talk about tangibly
until we experiment with the new communication channels.

On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 12:45 PM, Glen Mével <glen.mevel@crans.org> wrote:
> Yotam Barnoy a écrit (le 10/07/2016 à 16:47) :
>
>> […] I've found gitter to be ideal for this, much more so than IRC
>> (which has a high barrier-of-entry).
>
> what is so complicated about using the web interface to IRC [1] ?
>
> what about the barrier‐of‐entry to that gitter? i’ve never heard of it
> before and i’m not sure what’s so new there (apart from the built‐in
> persistence), but as i understood, it is a github service so it would
> require a github account (and to accept to be publicly linked to that
> github account, and to rely on proprietary solutions, etc·), whereas IRC
> requires nothing.
>
>> I'll enquire on IRC (just connecting requires me using an annoying
>> service like IRCCloud, which shows the problem -- I can't even post
>> the question and get a notification about a response.)
>
> at least the web interface mentionned above does notify you, and even
> plays a sound iirc. if you are not served within the hour and want to
> stay 24 hours a day to finally see your answer, then structured forums
> are better fit to your use than messy instant messaging anyway.
>
> --
> Glen Mével
>
> [1]: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#ocaml
>
> p·s·:
>
>> b. there are tools to scrape gitter history in existence, making the
>> fact that they're proprietary fairly irrelevant.
>
> the point about proprietary systems is not a mere matter of retrieving
> history…
>

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

[Yotam Barnoy]

Gabriel, I surveyed a few of the IRC lurkers. The sense I get from
their reactions is that they wouldn't want to leave IRC (which makes
sense) but would be open to a gitter room that connected to IRC via a
bridge.

This means that to establish the gitter room + bridge we need to:
1. Create the gitter room on the gitter site. This must be done by
someone with OCaml github credentials.
2. Follow the instructions on
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-gitter using an OCaml
server. The bridge must have access to github credentials as well.
3. Add the new room to the ocaml.org community page. Involves a simple PR.

On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 12:59 PM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com> wrote:
> I just asked on the neovim gitter, and the service they use to bridge
> with IRC is this one:
> https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-gitter
>
> Every aspiring programmer has a github account at this point. It's
> just reality. Even without one, you get to view gitter chat in
> realtime. IRC requires a bunch of extra arcane knowledge that most
> beginners aren't willing to learn, to a large degree because IRC is
> simply not being used actively anymore.
>
> Listen -- you can always dismiss features, and like I said,
> programmers tend to believe that what they use is the best and
> everything new or different is unnecessary. I get it -- I think like
> that automatically as well. I think we have to look beyond that --
> many of the advantages of new technologies seem minor but they add up.
> People were giving the same kinds of rebuttals to moving to github
> before that move was made (though I don't think the improvement will
> be anywhere near that delta).
>
> Perhaps the key thing to grasp here is this: we're competing with
> other languages and ecosystems for programmers. We need to be as
> attractive as possible. This competitiveness must take into account
> knowledge of the current tools and the impressions they leave on
> users. As soon as there's a hurdle in the way, many potential
> newcomers will be lost. The additional benefits to existing community
> members are there as well, but they're harder to talk about tangibly
> until we experiment with the new communication channels.
>
> On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 12:45 PM, Glen Mével <glen.mevel@crans.org> wrote:
>> Yotam Barnoy a écrit (le 10/07/2016 à 16:47) :
>>
>>> […] I've found gitter to be ideal for this, much more so than IRC
>>> (which has a high barrier-of-entry).
>>
>> what is so complicated about using the web interface to IRC [1] ?
>>
>> what about the barrier‐of‐entry to that gitter? i’ve never heard of it
>> before and i’m not sure what’s so new there (apart from the built‐in
>> persistence), but as i understood, it is a github service so it would
>> require a github account (and to accept to be publicly linked to that
>> github account, and to rely on proprietary solutions, etc·), whereas IRC
>> requires nothing.
>>
>>> I'll enquire on IRC (just connecting requires me using an annoying
>>> service like IRCCloud, which shows the problem -- I can't even post
>>> the question and get a notification about a response.)
>>
>> at least the web interface mentionned above does notify you, and even
>> plays a sound iirc. if you are not served within the hour and want to
>> stay 24 hours a day to finally see your answer, then structured forums
>> are better fit to your use than messy instant messaging anyway.
>>
>> --
>> Glen Mével
>>
>> [1]: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#ocaml
>>
>> p·s·:
>>
>>> b. there are tools to scrape gitter history in existence, making the
>>> fact that they're proprietary fairly irrelevant.
>>
>> the point about proprietary systems is not a mere matter of retrieving
>> history…
>>

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

[Ashish Agarwal]

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On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 10:32 PM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com> wrote:

> If you go to gitter's home page (https://gitter.im/home#) and choose
> create, you should be able to create a room for the ocaml repository.
>

I see, so it is for the ocaml repo, not the whole ocaml organization. Got
it. I suggest you send this request to the infrastructure@lists.ocaml.org
mailing list. One of the authorized owners of that repo is more likely to
see the request there, rather than in this long thread.

My opinion is that your request should be considered but not necessarily
approved. The developers of a project have the right to choose the
communication channels of the project they manage. Even if it is approved,
I doubt most of the ocaml developers will be interested in using this new
channel, so you might not have any of them following the discussions that
occur on gitter. To be clear, I'm expressing my own opinion and have no
authority on the ocaml repo.


On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 9:46 AM, Ashish Agarwal <agarwal1975@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 1:02 PM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Also, could someone with ocaml github permissions start a gitter.im
> >> page for OCaml? It should be relatively painless.
> >
> >
> > Can you explain what needs to be done exactly. When I'm logged in, I see
> > nothing at gitter.im/ocaml and when I'm logged out I see links for
> > ocaml/oasis and ocaml/opam. So something already works.
> >
> >
> >
> >> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Mohamed Iguernlala
> >> <iguer.auto@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> > 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."
> >> >
> >> > 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>
> >> > 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.
> >> > 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 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
> >> > 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 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>
> >> > 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>
> >> >> 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
> >> >>>
> >> >>>
> >> >>>
> >> >>>
> >> >>>
> >> >>>
> >> >>> --
> >> >>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> >> >>> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> >> >>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> >> >>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
> >> >>
> >> >>
> >> >
> >> >
> >>
> >> --
> >> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> >> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> >> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> >> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
> >
> >
>

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