making ocaml mainstream

making ocaml mainstream

[Tomasz Jamroszczak]

   I've been playing for a second time with Ocaml for a time now and I've  
got some insights in what could make the language more popular.

   First of all, it's potential target is severly limited by some facts  
that are maybe transparent for ocaml developers, but are cruicial for  
newcomers.  It is really usable only under Linux.  I.e. ocamldebug (which  
is basic programming tool) needs a big clumsy cygwin to work in Windows,  
and you can be sure that two thirds of programmers, had, have and will  
have configuration and maintanability problems with Cygwin.

   More severe flaw is that OCaml's workable only under Emacs.  Well, there  
is something like wowcamldebug for vim, but vim ain't that popular  
either[*].  That means that OCaml looses 90% of potential community due to  
immaterial problems.  Immaterial from point of view of the language  
architecture, but not from point of view of it's health.  But it's not a  
question of making IDE nur fur OCaml.  It's rather about making hilighter,  
indent, helpfile and debugger into the most popular IDEs, with the most  
prominent of them VS.NET.  Because of MSDNAA, young developers have decent  
tool for free and putting OCaml into Visual Studio, comforting to habbits  
of them, is the right thing to do.  Because the most valuable and easy to  
obtain for the greater glory of OCaml community - are these  
MSDNAA-involved greenhorns.

   Another stuff is that OCaml has this feeling of beeing a language of  
choice for pointy-headed geeks and thus simply too hard to grasp for an  
ordinary keyboard basher.  The feeling can be changed (with a lot of  
advocacy and marketing), because you can write programs in "Java style",  
and it doesn't require a lot of learning.  OCaml is fun and it's easy.   
And then it's new and it's powerful.  That's anything marketing guys have  
to say (see  
http://www.cabochon.com/~stevey/blog-rants/bambi-meets-godzilla.html and  
other marketing-related rants).

   We should also take closer look on the libraries.  Diversity is good.   
But if two libraries are covering the same field, it's dreadful.  They're  
fighting each other, the development is split between them and thus - in  
such a small community as OCaml's is - too small to maintain and develop,  
and at the end projects are abadoned.  But this is not the main pain in  
the libraries' world.  More grim is the fact that when programmer (not  
necessairly new to OCaml) wants some functionality spots two similar  
libraries, he has to make a choise.  And it's a Bad Thing(TM), because he  
has to either pick randomly and hope for his good luck, or he's to spend  
some time with both, which is mainly wasted time.  Moreover, it feels like  
struggling with the language.  Mind C++ which after phase of decline, has  
been given boost library - huge one, but single library which status is  
something like "non-standarized standard library".    Oh, and F# is not a  
good way to go.  F# won't be identical to Ocaml, and all we know what  
Babel tower of Lisps feels like.

   This together with initial configuration, beeing up-to-date - generally  
maintainng ones workspace - prevents a hot-headed newcomer from developing  
working code.  Instead of forming ideas developer has in his mind, he's  
beeing made to bend his neck to "proper" set of tools in order to comfort  
to the language.  While the grammar, standard library, fast object code  
and so on are in a deep shadow of all these workshop things.

   The learning curve for OCaml, including setting up environment, should  
be as flat, as possible.  The best in this matter is TCL, which has  
basicly one language vendor for Windows, it's already present in standard  
Linux distribution, and after a three hours from the beginning of  
installation, you can write non-trivial programs;  and after a week with  
TCL you feel like fish swimming in the water.  This is unreachable for  
OCaml of course, because TCL has the smallest grammar ever while OCaml's  
is quite complex, but nevertheless the installation part (including cygwin  
instalation and emacs learning) should be shortened, and some "OCaml  
subset for C++/Python/Java handbook" with subtitle "Creative fun" should  
be released at O'Reily.

[*] There's QT-based Camelia simplified IDE, I've got to give it a try.

tj.

Re: [Caml-list] making ocaml mainstream

[Joel Reymont]

Google for F#.

On Aug 19, 2006, at 2:24 AM, Tomasz Jamroszczak wrote:

> Because of MSDNAA, young developers have decent tool for free and  
> putting OCaml into Visual Studio, comforting to habbits of them, is  
> the right thing to do.  Because the most valuable and easy to  
> obtain for the greater glory of OCaml community - are these MSDNAA- 
> involved greenhorns.
>

--
http://wagerlabs.com/

Re: [Caml-list] making ocaml mainstream

[skaller]

On Sat, 2006-08-19 at 03:24 +0200, Tomasz Jamroszczak wrote:
>    I've been playing for a second time with Ocaml for a time now and I've  
> got some insights in what could make the language more popular.

IMHO: the lack of debugging support on Windows is an illusion.
Ocaml code just works (TM), you don't need a debugger. A couple
of debugging prints is usually enough to find problems.

I never use debuggers. Debuggers are for assembler geeks
and would-be assembler geeks writing low level C code :)

I think this is a matter of education -- you're looking
for a tool you don't need in the first place.

As to IDE support -- well it is much the same. I'm happy
enough with a text editor and command line compilation
with a script. It is only slightly more painful on Windows
than on Unix.

However I think you're right that a Visual Studio plugin
is the way to go. No one familiar with the VS editor
would ever want to learn a horrendous monstrosity like
Emacs .. let alone Vim's archaic terminal editing concepts
(ducks for cover!)

In an industrial setting, having Ocaml as part of a VS
project would be winner.

-- 
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net>
Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net

Re: [Caml-list] making ocaml mainstream

[Richard Jones]

Do you want to help us make OCaml more commercial?  A while back we
started a web site to help coordinate such activities:
http://wiki.cocan.org/

You might want to help to expand this page in particular:
http://wiki.cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_windows

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com

Re: [Caml-list] making ocaml mainstream

[Mike Lin]

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On 8/19/06, skaller <skaller@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 2006-08-19 at 03:24 +0200, Tomasz Jamroszczak wrote:
> >    I've been playing for a second time with Ocaml for a time now and
> I've
> > got some insights in what could make the language more popular.
>
> IMHO: the lack of debugging support on Windows is an illusion.
> Ocaml code just works (TM), you don't need a debugger. A couple
> of debugging prints is usually enough to find problems.


I agree with the major exception of there being no stack backtrace
for exceptions in native code. Markus Mottl's patch for this has been
sitting around for a while...please god, someone put this in the official
distribution and release it on godi etc...please, please

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Re: [Caml-list] making ocaml mainstream

[Joel Reymont]

On Aug 22, 2006, at 10:21 PM, Mike Lin wrote:

> I agree with the major exception of there being no stack backtrace
> for exceptions in native code. Markus Mottl's patch for this has been
> sitting around for a while...please god, someone put this in the  
> official
> distribution and release it on godi etc...please, please

Does this patch apply only to Windows or other platforms as well?

--
http://wagerlabs.com/

Re: [Caml-list] making ocaml mainstream

[Markus Mottl]

On 8/22/06, Joel Reymont <joelr1@gmail.com> wrote:
> Does this patch apply only to Windows or other platforms as well?

It was actually developed and tested on Linux, but it should work fine
with all platforms targeted by the OCaml native code compiler, since
it patches the way functions are generated in the intermediate
language used for code generation.

Regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Mottl        http://www.ocaml.info        markus.mottl@gmail.com

Re: [Caml-list] making ocaml mainstream

[Joel Reymont]

Where is this patch?

On Aug 23, 2006, at 1:00 AM, Markus Mottl wrote:

> It was actually developed and tested on Linux, but it should work fine
> with all platforms targeted by the OCaml native code compiler, since
> it patches the way functions are generated in the intermediate
> language used for code generation.

--
http://wagerlabs.com/

Re: [Caml-list] making ocaml mainstream

[Richard Jones]

On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 09:59:47AM +0100, Joel Reymont wrote:
> Where is this patch?

I'm not sure if this is the latest version, but see:

http://yquem.inria.fr/pipermail/caml-announce/2005-July/000003.html

Markus - this really should be a bug report (if it's not already).
I'd like to add my support too.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com

Re: [Caml-list] making ocaml mainstream

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

On 23 Aug 2006, at 11:30, Richard Jones wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 09:59:47AM +0100, Joel Reymont wrote:
>> Where is this patch?
>
> I'm not sure if this is the latest version, but see:
>
> http://yquem.inria.fr/pipermail/caml-announce/2005-July/000003.html
>
> Markus - this really should be a bug report (if it's not already).
> I'd like to add my support too.

It already is: http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=3885

Works fine on OpenBSD/i386, but I haven't had a chance to try it on  
amd64/macppc/arm or some of the more exotic OpenBSD architectures we  
distribute OCaml on.

-anil