Re: [Caml-list] language story on slashdot

[Pierre Weis <Pierre.Weis@inria.fr>]

Hi,

> >Some good mentions of OCaml; perhaps a good place for more? :)
> 
> Can I just ask the somewhat obvious question of whether the slashdot
> crowd is the kind of new OCaml users we want to be attracting at
> this point?  I don't mean to be elitist (seriously), and I just
> discovered caml a while back myself so I really have no business
> expressing an opinion here (that won't stop me :), but having a slew
> of flavor-of-the-month pseudo-programmers flood this list is not my
> idea of a good time.

I think this would not be a so hard problem: we would just have to
abandon this mailing list to pseudo-programmers and start a new
Caml mailing list on another INRIA's machine!

Anyway, such a flood would be great for our group and INRIA, even if
it is not that interesting for ``real'' Caml programmers and
implementors as you mentioned it...

>  I just tried to access the Great Computer
> Language Shootout a couple days ago to download some sample code to
> help a friend learn OCaml, but it was slashdotted into oblivion and
> had been for over a week.

Hey dear, don't run after the pseudo-programmers crowds like that! If
you want to get good examples of elementary Caml code, there is a
(presumably) much more relevant adress available:

http://pauillac.inria.fr/caml/Examples/oc/basics/eng.html

In addition, you would help us if you can add something or criticize
this set of examples when helping your friend to learn Caml !

>  This is a simple example of how more
> attention is not necessarily a good thing (it's back up now, but you
> can read Doug Bagley's opinion on the matter, and how he would
> rather have not been linked on slashdot, at
> http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/slashhole.shtml). 

You're right; however, we would be glad if people would have a look to
our well connected WEB site to find information about Caml, instead of
trying desesperately to connect to Doug Bagley's one ...

> People who are interested in trying new languages will discover
> OCaml on their own (like I and others did), and then will be
> motivated to approach it in a thoughtful and respectful manner
> because it's good, not because it's hip and CmdrTaco says he's going
> to look into it. 

Hope this will happen exactly as you describe it :)

> Of course, if the Inria folks want to increase the visibility of
> OCaml in general, and think slashdot is a viable platform for this,
> then I'll defer and shut up.

We have ambiguous feelings on this point: we need outside visibility
to enforce our inside-INRIA visibility and funding; on the other hand
we are not equipped to face flood and need calm to implement hard
stuff such as generic functions and mu-rule ...

> Chris
> 
> 
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Thank you for your constructuve contribution.

Pierre Weis

INRIA, Projet Cristal, Pierre.Weis@inria.fr, http://pauillac.inria.fr/~weis/


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