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

[Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com>]

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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>>> 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
>>
>>
>
>