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

[Kakadu <kakadu.hafanana@gmail.com>]

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
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> --
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>>>>> 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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