[ocaml-biz] The Hype Cycle

[Brian Hurt]

I thought I'd throw this peice of chum into these shark invested waters 
:-) to see what people thought:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3577746.stm

IMHO, Ocaml is still off to the left of Digital Media Centers on this 
curve.  Java is, I think, currently in it's trough of disappointment.  I 
also think functional program is starting to climb out of it's trough of 
disappointment.  

I think the peak of inflated expectations for functional programming was
in the late seventies/early eighties- the era of Lisp machines.  In 
retrospect, the trough of disappointment was inevitable.  The fact that 
Lisp needed (back then) specialized hardware to gain acceptable 
performance doomed it.

But the technical problems have been fixed.  Ocaml and Lisp/Scheme run 
with acceptable, even good performance.  Most of the remaining arguments 
against functional programming languages amount to they're not already 
popular.

One comment I will make- simply because a technology has had a peak of 
inflated expectations and descended into the trough of disillusionment, 
doesn't mean it's going to crawl back up the slope of elightenment to 
reach the plateau of productivity.  I vote that the Itanium is the current 
gold-standard example of this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/30/opteron_itanium_sales_q2/

-- 
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive,
difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of
mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
                                - Gene Spafford 
Brian