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

[Benedikt Meurer <benedikt.meurer@googlemail.com>]

On Dec 6, 2011, at 12:31 , Gerd Stolpmann wrote:

>> I would like to comment on a tangential aspect of the rationale you gave:
>> 
>>> Given that OCaml is such a nice language with a lot of useful frameworks
>>> available,
>>> it is too sad to see it loosing ground just because of it's closed
>>> development process
>>> and lack of time of the official team.
> 
> I'm quite reluctant to discuss topics about the said decline of something.
> However, there is certainly a point here. I have my own theory - basically
> the users with FP knowledge have now more options (e.g. F# or the
> JVM-based FP languages like Scala), and so the "share" for Ocaml is
> decreasing. This has nothing to do with the language.
> 
> However, the question is whether we can do more to attract programmers
> with FP knowledge (or even better educate programmers without). Ocaml is
> not doing enough here - there is no (really good) beginner's site, and
> there are not enough "success stories", i.e. users reporting that they
> solved something with Ocaml, and why it was a good choice.

Let me clarify what I mean: I think that both Gabriel and Gerd and right, and the success of OCaml does not solely depend on the openness of the compiler toolchain. Of course there's a lot more people can do to help with OCaml.

Now, I'm not particularly good at writing documentation or blogging about OCaml, but I can provide code and knowledge for the language implementation and in particular the compiler. And looking through Mantis there are others who are also willing to help with core stuff by sending patches, reporting bugs, etc. Unfortunately this is highly frustrating, as mentioned, because the OCaml core does not get a lot of love from the OCaml core team (for whatever reasons). Now you can move on and fork OCaml (Git makes that amazingly easy today) and add your patches, etc. We did this several times, and others also did. And the end you have the situation as we see it today: several forks with different goals / quality, various long standing bug reports with / without patches that don't get attention, almost no activity in the OCaml Subversion repository (as a result) compared to other active programming languages, and many frustrated contributors with time, interest and knowledge that would be really beneficial to OCaml otherwise.

> Gerd

Benedikt