[Ocaml-biz] Introduction.

[M.J. Stahl]

Good day everyone,

I am a new OCaml developer, and have a love of business so I decided
to suscribe to this mailing list.

A little background as to how I came upon OCaml:

I found Graydon's presentation on One-Day Compilers (which is my
passion, well compilers, not necessarily the one day part... but the
shorter dev time the better), and found some love for OCaml.

After I read over many of the posts of this site, a few questions
sparked in my mind. These were particularly sparked by the logo
discussion in August.  I don't think a logo is as important as a name.
To be honest with you (and it may be because I am new), I don't even
really know how to pronouce OCaml. Is it "O-Camel"? Or an acronym like
"O-C-A-M-L"?  Either way, let's be honest, I don't find it very
provacative.

I only bring up the term 'provacative' (am I spelling that right? =)
because I read another conversation, that many of the OCaml developers
are not marketers, they are geeks (which is fantastic) and therefore,
see no reason to participate in such 'endevours of rhetoric' such as
marketing. Well my thought on that is, the developers of the language
may not be, but those looking for new languages /could/ be.  And those
'seekers of languages' that I am speaking of are managers which are
notorious for picking technologies based on what is reviewed in the
latest Delta 'In-Flight' magazine (to paraphrase Joel On Software).
None the less, I am talking about semantics.

Let's talk a little about technology, or rather the abstraction there
of.  I am sure that many of us can agree that, superficially, the love
of any language is more like religious faith than provable insight
into the languages boons. So, after reading a few more entries about
Python and its relation to OCaml, I had a few more thoughts.

Trying to change the language one uses is rather difficult. I
personally change frequently because, as I said, my love is compilers,
and with that love comes the development of Domain Specific Languages
for any problems that a general purpose language doesn't solve for me
as well as I want it to. But I, much like many of you, probably feel
different about our languages. So here is what I propose.

Do not make an attempt at a 'switch' campaign. In fact, encourage the
use of all the popular languages, whether it is OCaml or not. Then
focus your development efforts, not on libraries, or 'make' utilities,
but on FFI's and connecting between C, C#, Java, Python, Perl, etc,
etc. Make their integration seemless. Make OCaml not a language of
technical superiortiy, make it language for social mobility, and in
turn, in management's eyes less of a risk, and more of an asset (I
hope everyone can see why they would think this).

What I am proposing is not something simple. But to be honest with
you... I personally am getting tired of linguistic evangelism, and the
countless rewrites of libraries (all language specific)... I
personally think its time for a little language integration and
interoperability.

Best regards, 

MJ Stahl