On Dec 6, 2011, at 10:10 AM, Gerd Stolpmann wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I will not jump in the "how to save OCaml from dying because nothing
>> moves" discussion. But just in the "nothing moves" discussion.
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 2:52 PM, ivan chollet <
ivan.chollet@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> The current status of OCaml is more than stable enough to serve its
>>> goals,
>>> which are to teach computer science to french undergrads and provide a
>>> playground for computer languages researchers.
>>
>> First, french undergrads sadly often still use camllight... Which is
>> not the case for example of Harvard undergrad
>> (
http://www.seas.harvard.edu/courses/cs51/lectures.html) and some
>> UPenn one (
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis341/). But you are right that
>> I can't find any well known university out of France using OCaml to
>> teach computer science...
>
> Well, if you ask whether _any_ FP language is taught, the results won't be
> much better.
>
> I'm currently doing consulting for a web company (in Germany) - around 60
> developers, many fresh from the University. There are only three guys
> knowing FP languages at all - one Scala, one Erlang, and one R. It's a
> complete failure of the academic education.
>
> IMHO it does not matter which FP language you are taught in. The point is
> that the students understand the ideas, and that they recognize them as
> relevant. These web developers here in the company have no clue that they
> actually developing a big continuation-style FP program.
>
> Gerd
>
>
>>
>> And for the "computer languages researchers" part, I'll refer you to
>>
http://caml.inria.fr/consortium/
>>
>>> A fork could possibly get traction from the community, but you would
>>> have to
>>> provide interesting features that the real OCaml does not provide. Bug
>>> fixes
>>> won't be enough.
>>
>> So now, here is my real problem. What are those famous so wanted
>> feature that this fork will provide? And what makes you (a plural you)
>> think that ocaml is such a slowly moving and evolving language?
>> According to the caml web site, in the past two years, we've seen
>> native dynlink, polymorphic recursion and first class module making
>> there way into the language. According to what can be found on the
>> trunk of the ocaml svn, the next release will have GADTs. And the
>> compiler have also been modified to incorporate things like a nice
>> multiprecision library (
http://forge.ocamlcore.org/projects/zarith/)
>> and some backends have been added.
>>
>> Except maybe haskell and Scala, can you really name me a programming
>> language that in fact evolves that quickly, and basically without ever
>> breaking backward compatibility? I really don't think that any of
>> python, perl, java, C, C++ would really win. But I might be wrong.
>>
>> So before saying we need to fork the OCaml compiler to add "much
>> needed patches", it would be nice to minimally agree on witch patches
>> are so much needed. Because if "the community" can't agree on this, I
>> doubt the future of this potential fork will be so bright.
>>
>> My 2c.
>>
>> --
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>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Gerd Stolpmann, Darmstadt, Germany
gerd@gerd-stolpmann.de
> Creator of GODI and
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