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

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Brian Hurt wrote:
> Brandon Van Every wrote:
> >
> > 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.

I accept that it's not considered a problem in UNIX-driven open source
communities.  I do see a problem for commercialization, however.  I'm
not sure of the boundaries of 'the problem', as I'm not so familiar with
how UNIX has been used commercially.  When I think of commercial UNIX, I
think of expensive proprietary offerings from Sun, IBM, HP, etc.  Linux
is that cheaper thing which carries open source culture with it.  It is
effective in some ways, maybe it fails in other ways.  I've really never
studied it up.  I'm much more familiar with how Windows commercial
culture operates.

A reminder as to topics and goals here.  This is the OCaml *BIZ* mailing
list.  That means commercial strategies, not just accepting the OCaml
open source community as it stands today.

> 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.

So what?  This isn't a popularity contest, this is about finding the
people who actually see what's wrong with the culture so that it can
change.  No 'biz' mailing list existed previously to someone like me
coming along and stating the need for such a thing.  It happened
precisely because I pissed people off.  Someone woke up and said, hmm,
good idea, let's start a biz list and see what happens.  Then, nothing
happened!  Until I started 'pissing people off' again about logos and
marketing materials.  So there is something correct about the guy who
doesn't sit still and is willing to piss people off.  Here is managerial
theory on that subject, if you're inclined to understand the meme in
broader terms:
http://www.teams.org.uk/shaper.htm

Bill Gates pisses *lots* of people off.  Go to school on that.

The people who don't piss anybody off are called something else.
http://www.teams.org.uk/coordina.htm
http://www.teams.org.uk/tworker.htm

> A command economy sounds exactly like what you're demanding.

'Demanding'.  This can devole into a boring discussion quickly, if you
like.  I am not 'demanding'.  I am instigating, cajoling, suggesting.
Frankly, if I had mission critical 'demands' for OCaml, and the
community could not meet them, I'd find another community that could.
One thing I get really tired of in open source communities, is people
who interpret every suggested course of action as a 'demand'.  Find me
the sentence where I demanded something of you.  It doesn't exist, it is
only your perception.

> > 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.

But it's all true.  Everyone running around doing their own thing, on
their own whim, is exactly the description of flakes.  Non-flakes march
in unison towards a well-defined goal, i.e. command economy.  Flaky
development has some power: it can explore more, and take risk more.
But it's slow and not basically controllable, you can't organize flakes.
All you can do is pander to them.  Try to retain their attention span
longer than the other product does.

I'd love to hear how there might be some ideological goal for OCaml that
would get a lot of people moving in the same direction, but your
comments seem to confirm that no such ideology exists or will exist.
Ergo, I contemplate how to market to flakes.

Implicitly, I'm also saying I doubt OCaml is ready for enterprise
anything.  Compared to using Java and C# in the enterprise, right now,
I'd say forget it.  A baseline level of popularity needs to be
established first.

Marketers don't necessarily respect everybody when they're trying to
come up with marketing strategies, BTW.  Marketers are worried about
what would be an effective ad campaign, not whether people feel good
about the ethics of formulating such ad campaigns.  (Yes I am assuredly
waxing Shaper here.  Less concern for ethics than results.)

Again I ask: what is catnip for the herd of cats?


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.