[Ocaml-biz] Shootout ill-advised

[Brandon J. Van Every]

I'm thinking The Great Computer Langauge Shootout
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ isn't so important to win after all.
It is marred by a typical open source difficulty: hackers who don't
really want to deal with anything in terms of marketing or business.
Lately I've been making a pitch for a standardized scoring system,
rather than the 'roll your own' approach that the Shootout currently
has.  I don't think people are really going to do a damn thing.  I think
they like just 'having fun' with the Shootout.  They don't have the
chops to make it an industry standard benchmark along the lines of
http://www.spec.org or some such.

There's an OCaml contingent monitoring the Shootout now.  I think that
was needed, and will be useful over time.  However, I don't think the
Shootout is the 'venue to world conquest' I originally assumed.

If someone wants to show off OCaml performance using benchmarks, they
should simply implement a benchmark comparing C++, Java, C#, and OCaml.
Nothing else matters.  Those are the strategic language targets.  Keep
it clean and focused.  Make it really easy for PHBs to understand the
bottom line.  Such a benchmark could use other benchmarks as a starting
point, it needn't be built entirely from scratch.  I've inquired on
comp.benchmarks about garbage collection benchmarks, and there's of
course the Shootout.

I say 'someone' because this isn't a big priority to me at this time.
I'm just saying, if you want marketing and business done right, ya gotta
do it yourself.  Making a benchmark into a useful marketing tool, rather
than just a hacker toy, requires a certain mindset.

I think this is true of every OCaml marketing / business agenda I can
think of, actually.  There are certain jobs that hackers / techies
aren't good at and simply won't get done.


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

"We live in a world of very bright people building
crappy software with total shit for tools and process."
                                - Ed McKenzie