[Ocaml-biz] language religions

[M.J. Stahl]

On Sun, 3 Oct 2004 13:39:49 -0700, Brandon J. Van Every
<vanevery at indiegamedesign.com> wrote:
> Hello MJ!  Welcome aboard, nice to have new blood.  Hope you don't read
> hostility into what follows, but taking action on what you propose is
> problematic.

I don't think you'll have to worry about me taking anything personal.
And my statement concerning languages as religions merely comes from
the circles that I have made an attempt to 'run in' in the past. Which
of course, as you can see, left a bad taste in my mouth concerning the
desire of programmers to switch to any other language than the one
taught to them in school, or demanded they learn by their employer.
Ultimately I think this closed-minded mentality comes from the lack of
passion when programming. Which saddens me greatly.

> I think you're about 20 years ahead of the times with this
> marketing approach of yours.

This seems to be the bane of my exsistence. =)
 

> 
> M.J. Stahl wrote:

> If I get back to OCaml, it will be due to belief in "strength as a
> systems language."  This is more towards the religious faith you speak
> of.

Which is fine, you have found something that works for you.. and
that's fantastic. I romantically equate that to finding love. Its the
same way I felt about Lisp the first time I read John McCarthy's
orginal 1959. I didn't necessarily see strength, I saw elegance
instead of poor hackery. I saw something that strength could be built
upon.


> Finally, Python saves finger typing work,
> but Java and C# don't.  They both have a 'corporate mundane' quality to
> their semantics; you have to do too many things to get something to
> happen.  I refer to them as 'worker cog' languages.  One Python guy on
> the Chandler project condemns both Java and C# as 'the new COBOL'.

The terseness of a language is always important for me. Both in
syntax, as well as in semantics. Paul Graham talks a little bit about
this in his 'Being Popular' paper.  And as I mentioned earlier, Lisp
had that for me (given 5 special forms and the ability to define a
function, I can interpret myself). Though most recently I believe I
have aquired a new mistree in the language Joy. A postfix stack based
language, with with unary operators, no functional arguments, and
environment, which I am currently playing with and incorporating many
of Tony Hoare's CSP ideas into.

> Your approach also puts the problem squarely in the hands of language
> experts who can actually do this kind of work.  That's not so many
> people.  When I look for OCaml marketing strategies, I look for
> strategies that large numbers of people can participate in.  Not just
> the province of a few experts... who in open source-land, are going to
> do what they want anyways.

I couldn't agree with you more. And this is another that saddens me. 
I talked to a school mate of mine about my theories concerning where
software development needs to be headed, and that direction is in
DSL's (ie, Language Driven Development -- god I hate those buzz-wordy
phrases).  His comment to me was, "..but compilers are hard to write".
Damn, he's right. I couldn't agree more, but I only believe this is
true because we don't teach people how to write compilers from the
get-go.

Though I do have to disagree on one point: and that is the where you
say "puts the problem in the hands of language experts who can
actually do this kind of work".  I think that you underestimate the
power of the people in the software development industry, or rather
their passion for their field.  Now understanably, this is not
everyone, so I am only including those that actually have the traits I
am speaking about, because those are the 'mover-and-shakers'.  I
myself, and definately not a good programmer in my own mind. I often
think that the reason I look for semantically and syntactically
elegant languages is because I need things to be simple, otherwise I'm
lost; ADD kicks in, and I'm off to another project.

All in all, I don't have a solution to this marketing quandry. And I
personally think any PR in favor of OCaml will just look like
evangelism, and people will turn a deaf ear. OCaml needs a champion,
and not one of flesh, but one of bytes. And I have never been good at
figuring out what those were, so I focused on languages, and let the
other people write the applications in them. =)

-M.