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
>
>
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