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

[Duane Johnson <duane.johnson@gmail.com>]

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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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