Re: Problems to get larger user base ... (Re: [Caml-list] OCaml's variables)

["Mr. Herr" <misterherr@freenet.de>]

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Am 27.05.2013 10:37, schrieb Fabrice Le Fessant:
> On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 9:43 AM, Mr. Herr <misterherr@freenet.de
> <mailto:misterherr@freenet.de>> wrote:
>
>
>     Am 26.05.2013 23 <tel:26.05.2013%2023>:49, schrieb Oliver Bandel:
>     > Which "bigger problems" do you think of?
>
>     I think the biggest problem is you generally can only learn FP and/or Ocaml at
>     university, because:
>
>  
> For fun, I recently followed the Scala course on Coursera. Having the same thing
> for OCaml would just be great for beginners.
>  
>
>     Then the community looks very small to me, and isn't it a bit closed?
>
>
> Closed, no, it might have looked like that a while ago, but now, there are many
> people/projects trying to attract people to OCaml. Just to name a few:
> - OCamlPro (pushing industrials to use of OCaml)
> - OCamllabs (organizing the community around OCaml)
> - ocaml.org <http://ocaml.org> (modernizing the official website)
> - Jane Street (funding the previous items, and pushing Core as a potential standard
> library)
> - INRIA (opening the development of OCaml itself)
> - OCaml'2013 (creating a conference for academics publications on OCaml)
> - OPAM (simplifying the installation of OCaml)
> - RealWorldOCaml (publishing a book in English for beginners)
>  and of course, many developers releasing their open-source contributions,
> organizing local events (come to ocaml-paris meetup, next time on July 2 !)
>
> Small, compared to Java, yes, but I was surprised by how many people would like to
> use OCaml, and cannot use it for corporate reasons, so they are not really visible.
>
>     > And how to solve them?
>
>     Why not go out to Usenet? You would need more tolerance to (even pointless)
>     discussions than toolslive@yh has shown.
>
>
> I don't now if there is an OCaml community on Usenet (I didn't go there for the
> last ten years...), but there are many discussion groups on OCaml using different
> communication media (Stack Overflow, Reddit, Twitter, #ocaml, etc.), so I don't
> think having _also_ the mailing-list is a problem.
>
I find other media not quite as good for discussions as the usenet, and a good news
reader, and I am reading this list on gmane.org. There is comp.lang.ml on usenet,
this would fit Ocaml.
>
>     I think we need code examples to _every_ function and variable/value.
>
>
> Indeed, people from Scilab told me that they did this, and it was a great success
> for attracting users.

Where is it? I did not find that yet, I only get "why is scilab not written in ocaml"
when searching...

>
> Note that it does not need to be done by the OCaml developers themselves, anybody
> can create a project on Github/Gitorious/etc. and start writing some documentation
> on  a module that he likes and have it published somewhere...
hint, hint! Yes, sure. I was looking for tools that would insert the example code
into the document, run it, and insert the result as well, some sort of advanced
literate programming.

/Str.

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