From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mail4-relais-sop.national.inria.fr (mail4-relais-sop.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.105]) by walapai.inria.fr (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id pB6M7llF021043 for ; Tue, 6 Dec 2011 23:07:47 +0100 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AtgAACaR3k7AbSoIhWdsb2JhbABDhQaiW4J9IgEBAQoLCxsEIYFyAQEFI1YQCwkRAiYCAhQYMSeHdaN3kXISgSCIajNjBI0xhzSSIg X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.71,309,1320620400"; d="scan'208";a="122306335" Received: from einhorn.in-berlin.de ([192.109.42.8]) by mail4-smtp-sop.national.inria.fr with ESMTP/TLS/DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA; 06 Dec 2011 23:07:42 +0100 X-Envelope-From: oliver@first.in-berlin.de Received: from first (e178038030.adsl.alicedsl.de [85.178.38.30]) (authenticated bits=0) by einhorn.in-berlin.de (8.13.6/8.13.6/Debian-1) with ESMTP id pB6M7ePo025449 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=NOT); Tue, 6 Dec 2011 23:07:40 +0100 Received: by first (Postfix, from userid 1000) id C4D7F1540358; Tue, 6 Dec 2011 23:07:39 +0100 (CET) Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 23:07:39 +0100 From: oliver To: Benedikt Meurer Cc: caml-list@inria.fr Message-ID: <20111206220739.GA2039@siouxsie> References: <1B0D83BD-1902-4F7C-B3FB-B759122D6AB9@googlemail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <1B0D83BD-1902-4F7C-B3FB-B759122D6AB9@googlemail.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14) X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang_at_IN-Berlin_e.V. on 192.109.42.8 Subject: Re: [Caml-list] OCaml maintenance status / community fork Hello, during the last years, more than one person mourned about this or that dark sides of OCaml. Even some of the mourning and the proposals had mentioned good ideas and had positive motivation, after a while it became clear, that the same people with the one or the other good idea, failed badly in other areas. Good, that they did not have had too much influence in the development of OCaml. Even in general I like the community/bazaar, I think in case of OCaml, there is a lot of high knowledge in the core team, which was criticized by others already, but in the long run, it turned out that the core team had their reasons for a lot of decisions, which were criticized. Ocaml of course will also have some history-related issues that might be changed, but maybe also a lot of decisions inside, which relies on theoretical reasoning. So I'm sceptical here again. There is a lot of software around, where even beginners could change it to the better. But regarding OCaml, I think even for advanced programmers, it might be easy to change it to the worse. Of course (nearly) nobody of the people on this list would admit that, but let's wait a while, and it maybe will show again, as it did before. ;-) Instead of general mourning, I think discussing on certain topics would make more sense. But this also was done already and often. Maybe I misunderstood the original intention of the thread starter, but that are just my opinions here. It's often assumed, that anything that is driven by the community / bazaar can flourish and anything driven by the "cathedral" is starving to death. Not sure if this is true. Isn't it a general problem of functional languages to have a small user base? What are the OCaml-forks doing? Are they flourishing? Do they make functional programming more popular? Or is it just a minor change? Functional languages are minority languages. And forks of such languages... are they really hype? It seems to me, that rather imperative languages pick up functional features, and become more popular through this kind of process. So... what happens if the minority splits again and again? Can a community of a hand full of users/hackers flourish more than a couple of hands of such people? Will Ocaml and other functional languages become more popular by splitting the user base into even smaller parts? Will such projects live long (enough)? I have some reasonable doubts here. Ciao, Oliver