Thank you for the very informative presentation, Gabriel.

Markus sums up a lot of my thoughts on the subject. One can point to so
many examples of competitors that gained momentum vs ones that lost it:
Amazon vs every other retailer, Apple vs Microsoft, Facebook vs Myspace
etc. What gets neglected is the little decisions along the way that helped
gain momentum. Those little things cause other little consequences, many of
them unpredictable. My research group used to use Assembla, which is a
decent hosting site, but one of our members forced us to switch to github,
and we haven't looked back: github has so many small features you get used
to, starting with its highly intelligent browsing engine compared to every
other solution, that other hosting sites can't compete. The combination of
git + github's feature-set makes github unbeatable.

As another example of momentum, my research group has already moved on to
Haskell, mostly for its parallelization abilities. I actually get laughed
at when I mention that I still use ocaml for my personal projects, though
it's still my personal preference.

As further anecdotal evidence, I would never have perused ocaml's source
code had I not searched for it on github. Of course, once I found out it
was a mirror of an svn, I was somewhat disappointed and lost any intention
of directly contributing (at the time). That's just human nature --
'everybody' is on github now, and for good reason, and
researchers/programmers want to streamline their toolsets and processes
just as much as the next person.

In order for ocaml to survive and thrive, it needs users. Many, many users.
Gabriel's presentation mentions that decisions made about ocaml's evolution
will still be there in 2025. They probably will, but ocaml may just be a
small personal project at that point -- much like the countless personal
languages I see around my department. Languages need to be marketed, and
they need to go viral to succeed. (The best salesmen I know for ocaml are
Anil and Yaron). Moving fully to github is not a huge step in that
direction, but I believe it's a step nonetheless.

-Yotam


On Sun, Dec 22, 2013 at 5:55 PM, Ashish Agarwal <agarwal1975@gmail.com>wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 22, 2013 at 9:03 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rich@annexia.org>wrote:
>
> (1) Putting a project on github increases the number of people
>> submitting bug reports and pull requests using github's proprietary
>> interface.  This is annoying because you need some way to tell them
>> not to do this, and to deal with people who do it anyway.  (libguestfs
>> -- hosted on github -- has an all-caps notice on the front page:
>> http://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs)
>>
>
> Click the settings icon at the middle right (for the individual repo, not
> the general account settings at the top right). There, you can disable the
> Issues and Wiki features. I don't know any way to prevent submission of
> pull requests. (I don't agree that these features should be avoided. I
> think GitHub is by far the best development tool set currently available.)
>
>