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

[Brian Hurt]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> Really.  Ok, tell me what I want?  Your view of what I want might
> clarify something here.

You want people to stop spending time on 'frivolous' projects like yet
another make replacement.  There should be one make, and everyone should
use it.  We should have a five-year plan, with deadlines.  You want there
to be central standards for everything.  You want Ocaml marketed to
hard-headed business people, not just techies.  In short, you want things
to work like Microsoft or Java.

> 
> > > But it's all true.  Everyone running around doing their own
> > > thing, on
> > > their own whim, is exactly the description of flakes.
> >
> > Then you and I live in a nation of flakes.  Because that's my
> > definition of a free culture- including a free market.
> 
> Yes we do, in fact.  The USA is a consumer driven culture.

Yep.  And it works better than you might suppose.

> 
> > Capitialism beat
> > the more unified but less intelligent Communism because it
> > takes advantage of these emergent properties.
> 
> But Microsoft has, to date, beaten everyone else with proprietary
> monopoly power.  It doesn't have to stay that way, and they're starting
> to show strains, but they're still doing ok at it.  So you can't assume
> that issuing commands and dictums is an invalid strategy.  Open Source
> is a contender, not a champion.

Monopoly is a failure mode of capitialism, and Microsoft has one.  
Microsoft has advantages that have everything to do with it being a 
monopoly and nothing to do with how it does business or what software it 
sells:
http://www.linspire.com/lindows_michaelsminutes.php

> 
> > > Again I ask: what is catnip for the herd of cats?
> >
> > Do something cool.  Do it in Ocaml.
> 
> What do the cats consider cool?  What do they download and pay attention
> to longer than 5 seconds?

Working code.  Even "boring" projects, like databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL) 
and enterprise web frameworks (Tomcat, Jakarta) are cool.

Programmers aren't nearly the flakes you seem to think they are, incapable 
of holding their attention on any one thing for more than five seconds.  
Quite the contrary- to be able to do anything in programming, you have to 
concentrate on learning to program for months to years.

But what gets us to concentrate is not flashy graphics or cute logos or 
clever buzzphrases.  It's working, usefull code.

In fact, I would argue that it's not the programmers who are the flakes-
it's the business people.  Emacs was started in 1976- xemacs forked from
emacs in 1991, about the time of Windows 3.0.  And vi is even older.

-- 
"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