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

[Tony Edgin]

On Tue, 07 Sep 2004 19:39, Olivier Grisel wrote:
> Brandon J. Van Every a écrit :
> >  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.
>
> "Il y a ceux qui font, et ceux qui font chier ..."
> 				-- Tristan & Daniel
>
>
> A more contructive attitude IMHO, would be to provide (concrete)
> proposals/solutions instead of criticizing other people's work.
>
> Best,
>
> --
> Olivier
>
> PS: to the maintainer(s) of the mailing list (Blair ?): could you please
> configure mailman to tag outgoing emails with a
> "reply-to: ocaml-biz at orcaware.com" header ?

Olivier is right.  I think this is especially true for open source developers, 
since they aren't being paid by us to do anything, we have no write to 
criticize their work or tell them what they should be doing instead.  Its 
just a hobby for them.  Part of what Brandon lacks with this crowd is street 
cred.  Maybe Brandon in all his vast amounts of free time :)  could produce 
an app for the Ocaml bazaar.  Guiltily I smile, this goes for me too.

Now I'm going to preach to the choir.  Brandon has a good point, but maybe his 
point is too sharp.  For Ocaml hobby programmers to be able to take Ocaml to 
work, project managers need to be convinced its the right tool for their job.  
The biggest thing PMs are worried about is mitigating risk and an unproven 
language is a very big risk.  To prove Ocaml is industrial strength, a few 
substantial projects need to be built and heavily publicized.  To aid in 
building these projects, a cohesive tool chest of easy to use utilities is 
needed.  I personally think an IDE should be one of them.  (Unix junkies, 
which I am one, need to be reminded that emacs is an IDE.)   

The Ocaml-biz group's goal should be to first come up with a list of tools; 
second choose a market where the projects could be made; third, research the 
Ocaml bazaar to find best fits for the tools; fourth encourage/help the tool 
owners to bring them up to professional standards; fourth,  integrate the 
tools into an easy to install package; and fifth publicize the hell out of it 
in the market we've chosen.

What are people's thoughts on this strategy?  We should also put a time table 
on this discussion.  How about after the end of next week someone summarizes 
the discussion into a strategy and we start implementing it?

cheers,
 
-- 
Tony Edgin