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 RAA27171; Wed, 13 Jun 2001 17:21:33 +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 RAA27178 for ; Wed, 13 Jun 2001 17:21:32 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from shell5.ba.best.com (shell5.ba.best.com [206.184.139.136]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id f5DFLVT03181 for ; Wed, 13 Jun 2001 17:21:31 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from localhost (bpr@localhost) by shell5.ba.best.com (8.9.3/8.9.2/best.sh) with ESMTP id IAA29234; Wed, 13 Jun 2001 08:21:27 -0700 (PDT) Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 08:21:27 -0700 (PDT) From: Brian Rogoff To: John Max Skaller cc: David Fox , caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: [Caml-list] ocaml complexity In-Reply-To: <3B262478.F927DF98@ozemail.com.au> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk 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 ------------------- Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr