Re: Estimating the size of the ocaml community

Re: Estimating the size of the ocaml community

[Jeff Shaw]

Here at michigan state university, my computational linguistics professor 
had us learn ocaml for the class and we used it exclusively. I like it so 
much better than c++! Hope this helps. 

Estimating the size of the ocaml community

[Yaron Minsky]

I've been trying to come up with some estimates on the size of the ocaml
community, and I'm wondering if others have come up with anything better.
Here's what I have so far:

- The mailing list is supposed to have about 500 subscribers[1].  Hard to know
  if this number is up-to-date.  I wonder if that number has changed over
  time, and what it is today.

- The OCaml Humps contributors page[2] has about 200 members.

- If you type OCaml into google, you get about 800k hits.  This compares with
  29 million for C++.  "python programming" (without the quotes) gets about 5
  million

- If you type "ocaml resume", you get about 5.5k hits.  If you type "python
  resume", you get about 270k hits.  If you type "C++ resume", you get almost
  1m hits.

- Some schools teach ocaml.  Brown and Caltech apparently have intro ocaml
  courses.  Any other places that teach the language?  Any ideas on how many
  students go through these courses?

- A few companies use ocaml, including Baretta DE&IT, Dassault Aviation,
  LexiFi, Artisan (which has been bought up by AMD?)  Anyone know of other
  such companies?  It would be interesting to get a list togther of companies
  that use ocaml significantly.

I'd be interested of any evidence people have of the size and vibrancy of the
ocaml community.  I'd be particularly interested in evidence of ocaml use in
the United States, since it seems like a majority of ocaml use is outside of
the US.

[1] http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list
[2] http://caml.inria.fr/humps/index_contributors.html

Re: [Caml-list] Estimating the size of the ocaml community

[Christopher A. Watford]

On Wed, 2 Feb 2005 16:31:28 -0500, Yaron Minsky <yminsky@gmail.com> wrote:
> - Some schools teach ocaml.  Brown and Caltech apparently have intro ocaml
>  courses.  Any other places that teach the language?  Any ideas on how many
>  students go through these courses?

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign uses OCaml to teach
programming language theory classes. This is where I was introduced to
OCaml for the first time. Basically we built parsers, lexers, and type
checkers. Function programming was included in the coursework, but
mainly to show its strong suits. Haskell is also taught in these
classes.

-- 
Christopher A. Watford
christopher.watford@gmail.com
http://dorm.tunkeymicket.com

Re: [Caml-list] Estimating the size of the ocaml community

[Frédéric Gava]

Hi,

> On Wed, 2 Feb 2005 16:31:28 -0500, Yaron Minsky <yminsky@gmail.com> wrote:
> > - Some schools teach ocaml.  Brown and Caltech apparently have intro
ocaml
> >  courses.  Any other places that teach the language?  Any ideas on how
many
> >  students go through these courses?

I think that "all" French Universities use OCaml to teach
functional programming  (some of them use Scheme or SML depending of the
years and/or the teachers). Ocaml is also used in "Classe préparatoires",
special schools in France to be engineers.

I also heard that Ocaml is sometime teach in Italian Universities but I am
not sure.

Regards,
Frédéric Gava

Re: [Caml-list] Estimating the size of the ocaml community

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 10:54:11PM +0100, Frédéric Gava wrote:
> I also heard that Ocaml is sometime teach in Italian Universities but I am
> not sure.

Yes, at least here at the Computer Science Department of the University
of Bologna it was teached in the past and used for students projects in
the compiler course, but this is no longer the case.  Still, it is used
as a programming language in some research projects.

I'm aware of the university of Urbino, in which OCaml is teached as a
part of the compiler course.

Hope this helps.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- Computer Science PhD student @ Uny Bologna, Italy
zack@{cs.unibo.it,debian.org,bononia.it} -%- http://www.bononia.it/zack/
If there's any real truth it's that the entire multidimensional infinity
of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. -!-

Re: Estimating the size of the ocaml community

[Vincenzo Ciancia]

Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:

> 
> I'm aware of the university of Urbino, in which OCaml is teached as a
> part of the compiler course.

In Pisa it's used as metalanguage in the programming languages course.

bye

Vincenzo Ciancia

-- 
Please note that I do not read the e-mail address used in the from field but
I read vincenzo_ml at yahoo dot it
Attenzione: non leggo l'indirizzo di posta usato nel campo from, ma leggo
vincenzo_ml at yahoo dot it