From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.3 (2006-06-01) on yquem.inria.fr X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.0 required=5.0 tests=AWL autolearn=disabled version=3.1.3 Received: from mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr (mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.82]) by yquem.inria.fr (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7A491BC6B for ; Thu, 1 Nov 2007 14:01:26 +0100 (CET) X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: Ao8CADZqKUdCm3xr/2dsb2JhbACQMg X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.21,358,1188770400"; d="scan'208";a="3917337" Received: from janestcapital.com (HELO smtp.janestcapital.com) ([66.155.124.107]) by mail1-smtp-roc.national.inria.fr with ESMTP; 01 Nov 2007 14:01:25 +0100 Received: from [172.25.129.161] [38.96.172.125] by janestcapital.com with ESMTP (SMTPD-9.10) id AE240850; Thu, 01 Nov 2007 09:01:24 -0400 Message-ID: <4729CE23.1040707@janestcapital.com> Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2007 09:01:23 -0400 From: Brian Hurt User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jon Harrop Cc: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Google trends References: <200711010102.39348.jon@ffconsultancy.com> In-Reply-To: <200711010102.39348.jon@ffconsultancy.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam: no; 0.00; ocaml:01 ocaml:01 haskell:01 erlang:01 cloud:98 silver:98 lining:98 sml:01 wrote:01 caml-list:01 short:01 functional:02 functional:02 programming:03 programming:03 Jon Harrop wrote: >The number of people searching for OCaml on Google has sky-rocketed since >Microsoft's announcement that they are productizing F#: > >http://www.google.com/trends?q=f%23%2Cocaml&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 > >I think this is very good news for the OCaml language as it will now have a >mainstream cousin to cover Windows while OCaml covers Linux and Mac OS X. >Hooray! :-) > > > Personally, I agree with you. The competition to Ocaml is not F#, or SML, or Haskell, or Erlang, it's not learning a functional programming language *at all*. Which is currently the most popular choice by programmers by far. It's weird, and I don't understand it, but there are a lot of people for whom Microsoft is a comfort zone- if Microsoft is doing it, it's worth while to learn (and safe to learn). Leave Microsoft, and you're in the howling wilderness with the barbarians. I agree that this makes no sense, but I know way to many of them for this to be coincidence. So Microsoft putting it's seal of approval on a functional language, *any* functional language, is a big deal. This means that a lot of people will be willing to look at F# who would never in a million years look at Ocaml. And while the code does not cross over, the programming experience (by and large) does. Someone who knows F# is going to find learning Ocaml a breeze. Short of Microsoft adopting Ocaml themselves (which isn't going to happen), this is as good of news as I can imagine for Ocaml. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And I find it humorous the number of people on this list looking for the cloud associated with this silver lining. Brian