Re: [Caml-list] OCaml maintenance status / community fork

[Pierre-Alexandre Voye <ontologiae@gmail.com>]

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And one of the great sub-topic is how to avoid that students *hate* FP.
When i say to other programmers i code in ocaml, they answer they
absolutely hate this language they have to learn at university. I met this
"effect" more than 15 times !
There's a great problem of old boring professors who teach FP with
uninteresting problems (and lectures).
So the litlle part of programmers who faces FP-language simply forget how
to think in FP way..

2011/12/6 Yitzhak Mandelbaum <yitzhakm@cs.princeton.edu>

> Gerd,
>
> I think this is a great topic, but perhaps we could change the title to
> keep it separate from the main discussion?
>
> (e.g. FP-language education)
>
> Yitzhak
>
> On Dec 6, 2011, at 10:10 AM, Gerd Stolpmann wrote:
>
> >
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> I will not jump in the "how to save OCaml from dying because nothing
> >> moves" discussion. But just in the "nothing moves" discussion.
> >>
> >> On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 2:52 PM, ivan chollet <ivan.chollet@gmail.com>
> >> wrote:
> >>> The current status of OCaml is more than stable enough to serve its
> >>> goals,
> >>> which are to teach computer science to french undergrads and provide a
> >>> playground for computer languages researchers.
> >>
> >> First, french undergrads sadly often still use camllight... Which is
> >> not the case for example of Harvard undergrad
> >> (http://www.seas.harvard.edu/courses/cs51/lectures.html) and some
> >> UPenn one (http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis341/). But you are right that
> >> I can't find any well known university out of France using OCaml to
> >> teach computer science...
> >
> > Well, if you ask whether _any_ FP language is taught, the results won't
> be
> > much better.
> >
> > I'm currently doing consulting for a web company (in Germany) - around 60
> > developers, many fresh from the University. There are only three guys
> > knowing FP languages at all - one Scala, one Erlang, and one R. It's a
> > complete failure of the academic education.
> >
> > IMHO it does not matter which FP language you are taught in. The point is
> > that the students understand the ideas, and that they recognize them as
> > relevant. These web developers here in the company have no clue that they
> > actually developing a big continuation-style FP program.
> >
> > Gerd
> >
> >
> >>
> >> And for the "computer languages researchers" part, I'll refer you to
> >> http://caml.inria.fr/consortium/
> >>
> >>> A fork could possibly get traction from the community, but you would
> >>> have to
> >>> provide interesting features that the real OCaml does not provide. Bug
> >>> fixes
> >>> won't be enough.
> >>
> >> So now, here is my real problem. What are those famous so wanted
> >> feature that this fork will provide? And what makes you (a plural you)
> >> think that ocaml is such a slowly moving and evolving language?
> >> According to the caml web site, in the past two years, we've seen
> >> native dynlink, polymorphic recursion and first class module making
> >> there way into the language. According to what can be found on the
> >> trunk of the ocaml svn, the next release will have GADTs. And the
> >> compiler have also been modified to incorporate things like a nice
> >> multiprecision library (http://forge.ocamlcore.org/projects/zarith/)
> >> and some backends have been added.
> >>
> >> Except maybe haskell and Scala, can you really name me a programming
> >> language that in fact evolves that quickly, and basically without ever
> >> breaking backward compatibility? I really don't think that any of
> >> python, perl, java, C, C++ would really win. But I might be wrong.
> >>
> >> So before saying we need to fork the OCaml compiler to add "much
> >> needed patches", it would be nice to minimally agree on witch patches
> >> are so much needed. Because if "the community" can't agree on this, I
> >> doubt the future of this potential fork will be so bright.
> >>
> >> My 2c.
> >>
> >> --
> >> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> >> https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/info/caml-list
> >> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> >> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> > --
> > Gerd Stolpmann, Darmstadt, Germany    gerd@gerd-stolpmann.de
> > Creator of GODI and camlcity.org.
> > Contact details:        http://www.camlcity.org/contact.html
> > Company homepage:       http://www.gerd-stolpmann.de
> > *** Searching for new projects! Need consulting for system
> > *** programming in Ocaml? Gerd Stolpmann can help you.
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> > https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/info/caml-list
> > Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> > Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
> >
>
> -----------------------------
> Yitzhak Mandelbaum
>
>
>
>
>
> --
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>
>


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