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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