From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id UAA20656; Thu, 29 Aug 2002 20:48:30 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id UAA20605 for ; Thu, 29 Aug 2002 20:48:28 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from wetware.wetware.com (wetware.wetware.com [199.108.16.1]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id g7TImFX15668 for ; Thu, 29 Aug 2002 20:48:21 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from kallisti.local.(ra05.wetware.com[199.108.16.85]) (3749 bytes) by wetware.wetware.com via sendmail with P:esmtp/R:bind_hosts/T:inet_zone_bind_smtp (sender: ) id for ; Thu, 29 Aug 2002 11:47:42 -0700 (PDT) (Smail-3.2.0.114 2001-Aug-6 #1 built 2002-Aug-4) Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2002 11:47:55 -0700 Subject: [Caml-list] objective caml and industry Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v543) From: james woodyatt To: The Trade Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In-Reply-To: <15725.62310.16647.701975@hod.void.org> Message-Id: X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.543) Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk On Thursday, Aug 29, 2002, at 03:11 US/Pacific, M E Leypold @ labnet wrote: > > Do you think so? I think 1 thing we can learn from Java, C, C++, > FORTRAN and COBOL is, that the only thing a language doesn't need to > "make headway into large systems development" is any smart mechanisms > for composing systems. That is to say: Success doesn't depend on > merit. I promise not to be broken record about this, but there are some things holding Objective Caml back from being an optimal language choice for large industrial applications development. I don't think any of the open problems in the research of mixin modules are on the list. Here are the main issues holding back industrial developers from adopting Objective Caml, I think: + Hysteresis. An awful lot of dollars have gone into the engineering of cubicle farms full of programmers who know Java, C++ and other iron age relics. These are dollars invested in training, development tools, documentation, the works. Using Objective Caml in university computer science courses can be inductive, but it's a long-term problem going forward. + Type inference is scary. All the languages popular in industry today that have syntactical support for polymorphism are either not strongly typed or they require types to be explicitly defined prior to their use. Industrial programmers will want to see the case made that type inference is a language feature worth the pain associated with learning how to work with it. I think a good case can be made; I just haven't seen it. And I'm in industry, so if it's kicking around in academia somewhere, it needs a wider audience. + Deployment issues. Industry likes to be able to treat every line of source code it writes as if it were a trade secret, even when there's no good reason to do so. It's like we're all queer for secrecy, or something. The languages most popular with industry today permit relatively easy distribution of dynamically loadable modules either in native machine code or in an already widely adopted virtual machine code. Objective Caml doesn't meet this criteria. + Stupidity. Objective Caml's popularity in academia is a curse as well as a blessing. For every coder like me who wonders if he should rather have gone into academia, industry has a hundred coders who think career academics are a fat lot of pencil-necked geeks who can't get "real" programming jobs. This is why industry continues to be populated with idiots who think the reason Java programs so often perform badly is the garbage collector. These are also the same people who will tell you that the syntax of Objective Caml is intolerably bizarre, while simultaneously raving about the elegance of C#. (I'm not bitter. I'm not bitter.) I started writing these in descending order of importance, but by the time I got to the last one I began to think maybe I got it exactly backward. All of these views are my own alone. Maybe the two in the middle are the ones I would recommend the Caml team think about in their copious spare time. -- j h woodyatt markets are only free to the people who own them. ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners