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 MAA18431; Thu, 18 Mar 2004 12:23:26 +0100 (MET) 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 MAA17815 for ; Thu, 18 Mar 2004 12:23:24 +0100 (MET) X-SPAM-Warning: Sending machine is listed in blackholes.five-ten-sg.com Received: from postfix3-2.free.fr (postfix3-2.free.fr [213.228.0.169]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.12.10/8.12.10) with ESMTP id i2IBNNHd009782 for ; Thu, 18 Mar 2004 12:23:23 +0100 Received: from warp (bordeaux-1-62-147-59-228.dial.proxad.net [62.147.59.228]) by postfix3-2.free.fr (Postfix) with SMTP id 56EB9C0F0; Thu, 18 Mar 2004 12:23:09 +0100 (CET) Message-ID: <00cd01c40cdb$71c34410$4500a8c0@warp> From: "Nicolas Cannasse" To: , "Richard Jones" , References: <07FEC955-782B-11D8-850C-000A957FFA4A@csun.edu> <20040318001905.36025.qmail@web41206.mail.yahoo.com> <20040318085638.GA11753@swordfish> <20040318103140.GA20448@redhat.com> Subject: Re: OCaml's Cathedral & Bazaar (was Re: [Caml-list] Completeness of "Unix" run-time library) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2004 12:22:12 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1158 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165 X-Miltered: at concorde by Joe's j-chkmail ("http://j-chkmail.ensmp.fr")! X-Loop: caml-list@inria.fr X-Spam: no; 0.00; cannasse:01 warplayer:01 ocaml's:01 caml-list:01 run-time:01 observations:01 cpan:01 pointers:01 cpan:01 python:01 developping:01 librairies:01 librairies:01 facto:01 extlib:01 Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk X-Keywords: X-UID: 165 > I broadly agree with Matt's analysis of the situation. Here are some > observations of my own. > > (1) Perl gets along quite nicely with a loosely defined and broadly > distributed standard library. However what Perl has which OCaml does > not is a central repository (CPAN) where you can find all those > libraries. I don't just mean find pointers to the libraries (the > Humps), but I mean a place where you can get the actual source. [...] I don't think the main issue is technical. I'm not sure that a CPAN will help OCaml to spread, that it will turns the community into a self organizing decentralized one that makes the power of Perl, Python and other languages out there. OCaml have more social issues. Let's see the facts : A programming language need either a very good community support (so the whole community is helping developping it) or a very good businness backup ( Sun and Java ). OCaml doesn't have any : the community is mainly academic folks that are using OCaml as a (very useful) tool for their research, the INRIA is a centralized system with only small openness to user's contributions - through the wish list for example, neither having a whole team of people working 24/7 at improving the language (they're academics people, they need time to write papers, attend conferences, etc.). Industry adoption of ocaml is in earlier stages, and is not enough wide to push the language as fast as expected from the community. The language itself is still evolving, there is people doing great work on OCaml itself or other librairies, but a lot of OCaml hackers here are feeling quite quickly frustrated with the social interactions, the void of official answers when some important questions are raised, and the unability to simply discuss about what should be added/modified in the standard library. There is several ways of dealing with this : - keep continuing without changing anything, but how much time will Ocaml continue being the best language around ? - try to build librairies with the hope that they'll one time become standard (de facto , or integrated into official release) : that's what we're doing with ExtLib ( http://ocaml-lib.sf.net ) - ask INRIA to open source OCaml ( means : either GPL or recruit language team among community hackers ) - stop writing Ocaml, and switch to another language with better community integration - write your own language, and build your own community :-) One question is : will we get a single official answer to this thread ? Nicolas Cannasse ------------------- 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