On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 01:02:39AM +0000, Jon Harrop wrote:
> The number of people searching for OCaml on Google has sky-rocketed since 
> Microsoft's announcement that they are productizing F#:
> 
> http://www.google.com/trends?q=f%23%2Cocaml&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
> 
> I think this is very good news for the OCaml language as it will now have a 
> mainstream cousin to cover Windows while OCaml covers Linux and Mac OS X. 
> Hooray! :-)

This is hardly a cause to cheer.  The two languages aren't compatible
in any way which is relevant to the real world, and the libraries are
completely different.  Microsoft could have contributed valuable
changes back to OCaml, but instead decided to produce their own
incompatible clone.

The apparent decision to "cover Windows while OCaml covers Linux and
Mac OS X" reminds my suspicious mind of the deal which Microsoft
proposed to Netscape, to divide the browser market with Internet
Explorer on Windows and Netscape on everything else.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat