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

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

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Dean Thompson wrote:

> But there’s at least one con: Discourse is not nearly as well established
> or widely known as some other alternatives, so might be less appealing to
> casual participants.
>

Yeah, mailing-lists and IRC channels are rather more established.

I hear very bad things about Slack for large communities -- it seems to be
intended for tight-knit teams inside a single organization:

https://medium.freecodecamp.com/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-we-deeply-regretted-it-391bcc714c81#.2ow2y1lcb
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9754626

It's pretty clear that Slack is not, and never will be, built for this
> use-case. Slack is for *teams*: small groups where everyone knows
> one-another by name, can be trusted with one-another's email-addresses and
> other contact information, can be trusted to only use @everyone triggers
> for important things, etc. A lot of Slack's features are built to assume
> this "small group with a shared purpose where everyone can be trusted to
> fiddle with things" paradigm.

The only feedback I could get from gitter.im is "it spams my mailbox
constantly", not exactly high praise. I'm sure it's a good tools for
people, but the fact that it is a proprietary tool built by a for-profit
company is giving me pause.

In general I support the idea of "meeting the users where they are" even
when that mean displeasing technological choices; this is why I have been
active answering OCaml questions on StackOverflow in the past. I would be
interested in making experiments with either:

- Discourse: I also heard bad things about it, but it's shiny, reactive and
open source

- Mattermost, as an open-source alternative to Slack -- but we would need
to find someone willing to host an instance.

On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 9:46 AM, Ashish Agarwal <agarwal1975@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 1:02 PM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Also, could someone with ocaml github permissions start a gitter.im
>> page for OCaml? It should be relatively painless.
>>
>
> Can you explain what needs to be done exactly. When I'm logged in, I see
> nothing at gitter.im/ocaml and when I'm logged out I see links for
> ocaml/oasis and ocaml/opam. So something already works.
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Mohamed Iguernlala
>> <iguer.auto@gmail.com> 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
>> visit
>> > the new OCaml website at ocaml.org."
>> >
>> > and on ocaml.org, you'll find a "modern website" with a "more
>> conventional"
>> > 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 écrit :
>> >
>> >
>> > On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 8:40 AM, Gabriel Scherer <
>> gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>
>> > 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
>> 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.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > 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
>> other
>> > 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
>> substantial
>> > 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
>> there
>> > 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,
>> slack,
>> > or google groups.
>> > - I clicked "Info" to get more info about the mailing list on infria.fr
>> and
>> > 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
>> their
>> > advertising signal.
>> >
>> > Duane Johnson
>> >
>> >
>> > On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 8:40 AM, Gabriel Scherer <
>> gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>
>> > 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
>> 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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>> >>> 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
>> >>
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>>
>> --
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>> 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
>>
>
>

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