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

[Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com>]

As I mentioned above,
a. the neovim project has already made heavy use of a gitter/IRC
translation bot (bridge) at https://github.com/finnp/gitter-irc-bot
and
b. there are tools to scrape gitter history in existence, making the
fact that they're proprietary fairly irrelevant.

The bot requires a server on which to run and github credentials for
the project.

As a response to your comment about real-time messaging, I think
there's space for different styles of communication. Sometimes you
don't want structured discussions. This is especially true for
newbies, but sometimes everyone wants a low-latency discussion where
not every sentence counts. I've found gitter to be ideal for this,
much more so than IRC (which has a high barrier-of-entry).

I'll enquire on IRC (just connecting requires me using an annoying
service like IRCCloud, which shows the problem -- I can't even post
the question and get a notification about a response.), but people
using the status quo tend to favor the status quo, so my hopes aren't
so high.

Creating the gitter room is effortless, so I recommend doing it
regardless as an experiment. Worst case, we don't advertise it, and
shut it down later on.

On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 10:34 AM, Gabriel Scherer
<gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm personally not enthusiastic about real-time synchronous messaging (for
> the already mentioned reason that it does not produced structured, reusable
> content), and I think it would be nice to gather the opinion of the people
> that populate the IRC channel today.
> (Plus gitter.im is a proprietary, for-profit platform, meh.)
>
> Yotam, would you be willing to go on IRC and have a chat about a gitter.im
> room with the chan, to see what they think?
>
> It would also be nice to have a gitter/IRC bridge (I hear that this exists).
> Who would be volunteering to take care of the gitter stuff and make sure
> that the bridge works properly?
>
> On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 10:29 AM, Jesse Haber-Kucharsky
> <jesse@haberkucharsky.com> wrote:
>>
>> I think a Gitter room could be a great experiment, especially since OCaml
>> is hosted on GitHub.
>>
>> I have seen the Gitter rooms for projects in the Scala ecosystem like
>> Shapeless and Cats become vibrant and helpful spaces, and chat rooms have
>> fewer psychological barriers to entry than mailing lists.
>>
>> On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 10:25 AM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 10:03 AM, Gabriel Scherer
>>> <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > https://vector.im/beta/#/room/#freenode_#ocaml:matrix.org
>>>
>>> How about we try to open a gitter room for ocaml/ocaml, and see how it
>>> does? My hunch is that it'll do a lot better than IRC for many
>>> reasons, but I could be wrong.
>>>
>>> --
>>> 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
>>
>>
>