From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id UAA15473 for caml-redistribution; Sun, 22 Aug 1999 20:13:10 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id NAA24339 for ; Fri, 13 Aug 1999 13:04:09 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from iggy.triode.net.au (iggy.triode.net.au [203.63.235.1]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id NAA09185 for ; Fri, 13 Aug 1999 13:04:05 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from egret (pm1-17.triode.net.au [203.63.235.33]) by iggy.triode.net.au (8.9.3/8.8.8) with SMTP id UAA28676; Fri, 13 Aug 1999 20:58:32 +1000 Message-Id: <3.0.6.32.19990813203205.00990520@mail.triode.net.au> X-Sender: skaller@mail.triode.net.au X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Light Version 3.0.6 (32) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 20:32:05 +1000 To: Markus Mottl From: John Skaller Subject: Re: convincing management to switch to Ocaml Cc: caml-list@inria.fr (OCAML) In-Reply-To: <199907300800.KAA25943@miss.wu-wien.ac.at> References: <14239.6150.864319.797849@gargle.gargle.HOWL> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: weis At 10:00 30/07/99 +0100, Markus Mottl wrote: >The reason, why my proposal was declined, was that "industry needs C++ >so we teach C++" - what a miserable attitude for an academic institution! I beg to differ. At my alma mater, a point was made _not_ to teach anything that smacked of being 'commercial'. They even invented a 'machine' to teach machine principles, instead of using an existing micro-processor. [They also completely messed up the design] As a result, competing universities have much better graduate employment records, and the particular department is suffering serious financial problems. (Many graduates couldn't write a program, industry prefered engineers, physicists, and mathematicians to computer scientists] Now they teach a new OO language to first years (sigh), and C/C++ to second years. [and ocaml to third years I believe] Computer programming is primarily a _commerical_ processes: people write programs for industry, and they are themselves _employed_ to do so, that is, they make their living out of it. And a lot of that work is involved in interfacing to existing code. Of course you can write wrappers. Perhaps it is easy. So where are they? How much work is involved in wrapping ALL the POSIX and Microsoft windows API?? How much work implementing the functionality of Swing, delivered standard with Java? >> * Ocaml is an academic langage > >As you can see above, even academia is not prepared to change its mind >easily. Of course not. Fundamentally, academia is part of industry, which is naturally and wisely conservative. >The true reason, why your boss comes up with arguments against OCaml >(about which he obviously doesn't know anything at all) is, well, not >laziness to change mind: I'd say he is *risk averse*. Which, surely, is reasonable. >It's the same as with Linux: although provably technically superior to >most competitors on the market (especially *the* competitor), management >in industry was very reluctant to make use of it - if some project fails, >a manager cannot be blamed for having used "new toy technologies" (even >though these technologies would have made a failure much more unlikely). Ah, but that is now changing as (Redhat) Linux proves itself and is being accepted as the most serious competitor to both Sun and Microsoft. >The same is true for OCaml: one has to admit that industry got "burned" >from time to time when they decided to make use of a "new" language. Yes. And much better supported ones too. Such as Eiffel. Indeed, many are now getting 'burned' by Java. C++ on the other hand has much to recommend it: widely used, ISO Standardised, C compatible, and designed not to compromise efficiency. And a huge number of books published on it. OTOH, ocaml has a number of problems compared with C++: it doesn't support separate compilation properly (mutually recursive calls don't work), it has bugs, there is no readable reference (in English) -- the language reference is good, but it is for experts, the tutorial is good, but it is for beginners .. and currenly, I'm in the middle. In fact, I'm kind of happy that ocaml ISN'T widely used! It gives the developers a much freer hand in changing it, without burning too many projects. ------------------------------------------------------- John Skaller email: skaller@maxtal.com.au http://www.maxtal.com.au/~skaller phone: 61-2-96600850 snail: 10/1 Toxteth Rd, Glebe NSW 2037, Australia