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

[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.
>> 
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>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 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
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> 
> 
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-----------------------------
Yitzhak Mandelbaum