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

[Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com>]

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
>>>
>>>
>>
>>