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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 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 vi= sit > the new OCaml website at ocaml.org." > > and on ocaml.org, you'll find a "modern website" with a "more conventiona= l" > 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 =C3=A9crit : > > > On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 8:40 AM, Gabriel Scherer > 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 bett= er, >> talk about the cool world that is being done in the OCaml communities, a= nd >> importantly talking about it outside it. Supporting software projects th= at >> have a potential for impact outside the OCaml community is also key -- C= oq, >> MLdonkey, Coccinelle, Flow, the SLAM static verifier toolkit, just to na= me 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 oth= er > 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 substanti= al > 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 the= re > 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, sla= ck, > or google groups. > - I clicked "Info" to get more info about the mailing list on infria.fr a= nd > 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 the= ir > advertising signal. > > Duane Johnson > > > On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 8:40 AM, Gabriel Scherer > 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 peri= od >> 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 bett= er, >> talk about the cool world that is being done in the OCaml communities, a= nd >> importantly talking about it outside it. Supporting software projects th= at >> have a potential for impact outside the OCaml community is also key -- C= oq, >> MLdonkey, Coccinelle, Flow, the SLAM static verifier toolkit, just to na= me 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 sy= stem >> (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 pleth= ora >> 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 start= ing >> 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 tha= t 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 inst= all >> 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 inst= all >> 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 n= ice >> 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 =E2=82= =AC30 a month >> to fund such a position.) I think this is a difficult position because t= here >> 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 >> 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 o= f 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 OCam= l, to >>> the OCaml Users and Developers Workshop. Technical progress is rapid. B= ut 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=E2=80= =99s >>> 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 >> >> > >