[Ocaml-biz] The strategic future of OCaml for 2..4 years

[Brian Hurt]

On Mon, 6 Sep 2004, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> Brian Hurt wrote:
> >
> > Note that the culture Ocaml grew out of has it's advantages and
> > disadvantages.  It gave Ocaml a mature and power set of tools
> > from the
> > get-go.  But it also saddled Ocaml with a set of tools with
> > some serious shortcomings.
> 
> The OCaml community contains the seeds of its own destruction, er,
> rebirth.  We've got like 10 different tools (it seems) trying to improve
> upon Make.  

And Ocaml is no different from C/C++ in this regard.  Well, OK- Ocaml 
*only* has 10 different tools.  Here's a start:
http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Build_Management/Make_Tools/

I notice they didn't include original BSD Make or imake either.

> OCaml is not 'saddled' in any long term sense.  It's an
> interim problem.  The interim is going to be 5 years however.

I don't consider it even an interim problem.  Not in it's culture.  
This sort of plethora of tools is common in the Unix/Make culture.  
Consider editors- you have emacs and vi as the two big camps, but also 
joe, jed, elvis, microemacs, etc.  Consider GUI toolkits- Gnome vr.s KDE 
vr.s OpenStep vr.s Motif vr.s Xlib vr.s who the heck knows what else.  And 
so on and so forth.  

It *is* a problem in different cultures.  The VS studio culture, for
example, is not used to having multiple different GUI toolkits, build 
tools, etc.  You get one tool, and you make it work.

As a side note, comming into a new culture and then telling everyone that 
they're doing everything wrong, and that they don't understand anything, 
is not likely to win friends or influence people.  Englishmen who come 
over here and yell at us for driving on the wrong side of the road are 
laughed at, at best.  More likely just ignored.

> Timeliness to market is not one of the advantages here.  The free market
> of volunteer ideas and labor might arrive at superior solutions, or it
> might just wallow around indefinitely.  Until developers get distracted
> by something better than OCaml and just drop it.  I see no necessity in
> progress, without some kind of specific driving force for progress.
> 
> [I think you meant 'command economy'.]

Yes.  Thinko there.  It was late.

A command economy sounds exactly like what you're demanding.  "OK- 
everyone, stop working on your make replacements!  We have our official, 
standard Ocaml make tool.  We don't care if your replacement is better, 
worse, or just different.  We have a standard!"

The open source software culture is very deeply similiar to a 
capitialistic market.  The choice of a bazaar by ESR was not accidental.  
Anyone can show up, throw a rug down, and start hawking their wares.  
Successfull projects, like successfull businesses, grow.  They gain 
reputation and "customers" (i.e. users), and profit therefrom.

Note that a command development economy works against Ocaml as much as 
for.  If the open source community as a whole decided to standardize on an 
applications language today, what would be the probability that it'd be 
Ocaml?  Ocaml is much better off in bazaar than in a cathedral.

If something better than Ocaml came along, I'd count that as a win.  Note 
that I don't consider Python better, or even nearly as good, as Ocaml.  
But if Ocaml itself got outcompeted, then the entire programming community 
would (IMHO) benefit.

> In other words, if you want to market to flakes... highly intelligent,
> possibly even code prolific flakes, but nevertheless flakes - what do
> you do?  What's catnip for the herd of cats?

Certain, calling people names like 'flakes' is not a way to win friends 
and influence people.

We've heard this before.  You're not saying anything I haven't heard a 
hundred times.  We're driving on the wrong side of the road, rubbing blue 
mud into our bellies, and doing all sorts of things which makes no sense 
whatsoever to you.  Well, guess what.  It makes sense to us.  

If you haven't read ESR's writtings on this subject, I highly recommend
them:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

They're better than Fodor's for explaining the local culture.

-- 
"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