Jon Harrop a écrit :
> If you want to draw aspirations based upon popularity, look at the most 
> popular languages: Java and C#. [...]

I which world? Do you have references? These languages might be the most
commercially {backed,advertised,etc.}, so I guess you are refering to
the software industry / Windows world. I don't care (and I think I am
not the only one on this mailing-list) about what companies use for
their proprietary software! Even (most) Windows users don't!

However, there is also the free software world. Here are some concrete
numbers (taken from Debian):

steph@korell:~$ aptitude search '?tag(implemented-in)'|wc -l
7834
steph@korell:~$ aptitude search '?tag(implemented-in::c)'|wc -l
4011
steph@korell:~$ aptitude search '?tag(implemented-in::perl)'|wc -l
1694
steph@korell:~$ aptitude search '?tag(implemented-in::c\+\+)'|wc -l
1030
steph@korell:~$ aptitude search '?tag(implemented-in::python)'|wc -l
831
steph@korell:~$ aptitude search '?tag(implemented-in::ocaml)'|wc -l
185
steph@korell:~$ aptitude search '?tag(implemented-in::java)'|wc -l
180
steph@korell:~$ aptitude search '?tag(implemented-in::c-sharp)'|wc -l
103
steph@korell:~$ aptitude search '?tag(implemented-in::haskell)'|wc -l
72

Note that the same package might be implemented in several languages
(e.g. C and target language for bindings).

> [...] They are far more popular than OCaml for many 
> reasons but parallel threads to make efficient multicore programming easy is 
> a big one.

Hummm... I'm very doubtful about this claim. I would say that the
"popularity" you are talking about is more about the commercial backing
behing the languages than the languages themselves...


Best regards,

-- 
Stéphane