Re: Problems to get larger user base ... (Re: [Caml-list] OCaml's variables)

[Fabrice Le Fessant <Fabrice.Le_fessant@inria.fr>]

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On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 9:43 AM, Mr. Herr <misterherr@freenet.de> wrote:

>
> Am 26.05.2013 23:49, schrieb Oliver Bandel:
> > Which "bigger problems" do you think of?
>
> I think the biggest problem is you generally can only learn FP and/or
> Ocaml at
> university, because:
>

For fun, I recently followed the Scala course on Coursera. Having the same
thing for OCaml would just be great for beginners.


> Then the community looks very small to me, and isn't it a bit closed?
>

Closed, no, it might have looked like that a while ago, but now, there are
many people/projects trying to attract people to OCaml. Just to name a few:
- OCamlPro (pushing industrials to use of OCaml)
- OCamllabs (organizing the community around OCaml)
- ocaml.org (modernizing the official website)
- Jane Street (funding the previous items, and pushing Core as a potential
standard library)
- INRIA (opening the development of OCaml itself)
- OCaml'2013 (creating a conference for academics publications on OCaml)
- OPAM (simplifying the installation of OCaml)
- RealWorldOCaml (publishing a book in English for beginners)
 and of course, many developers releasing their open-source contributions,
organizing local events (come to ocaml-paris meetup, next time on July 2 !)

Small, compared to Java, yes, but I was surprised by how many people would
like to use OCaml, and cannot use it for corporate reasons, so they are not
really visible.

> And how to solve them?
>
> Why not go out to Usenet? You would need more tolerance to (even pointless)
> discussions than toolslive@yh has shown.
>

I don't now if there is an OCaml community on Usenet (I didn't go there for
the last ten years...), but there are many discussion groups on OCaml using
different communication media (Stack Overflow, Reddit, Twitter, #ocaml,
etc.), so I don't think having _also_ the mailing-list is a problem.

I think we need code examples to _every_ function and variable/value.
>

Indeed, people from Scilab told me that they did this, and it was a great
success for attracting users.

Note that it does not need to be done by the OCaml developers themselves,
anybody can create a project on Github/Gitorious/etc. and start writing
some documentation on  a module that he likes and have it published
somewhere... We did "Cheat Sheets for OCaml" at OCamlPro a while back,
such independent initiatives are always welcome by the community.

--Fabrice

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