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

[Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>]

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> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>
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