Re: [Caml-list] ocaml complexity

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@best.com>]

On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, John Max Skaller wrote:
> David Fox wrote:
>  > I'm just saying that popularity is a good thing for a programming >
> language.
> 
> 	Recent comment on the C++ committee refector indicates this
> is not always the case. Even obvious faults, especially
> in libraries, can't be fixed if there are too many users.

Interesting that you should say that, since I've seen a few posts from the
implementors which suggested that there was a concern for backward
compatibility which sometimes kept little things from being fixed; the
latest was in the exchange between Pierre Weis and Jacques Garrigue with
respect to lvalues and mutable fields in objects. 

IMO, as someone with old code to maintain, I say fix things and make the 
language as close to perfect as you can. I knew when I came aboard that 
OCaml wasn't like Ada or Common Lisp (an ANSI or ISO standard) or even
like SML. When OCaml becomes so popular that it one of these standards
organizations is involved, there will be significantly less ability to 
make incompatible changes. 

Anyways, more growth is good. If OCaml reaches Python's popularity, that
would be great. 

This thread, while rambling, has been quite interesting. A few ideas for 
writing an OCaml tutorial were discussed, and some contributed problems
that they had while learning OCaml. Perhaps we users should start writing
tutorials, rather than asking INRIAns, as I'd rather that they work on 
growing the language.

-- Brian


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