Re: When functional languages can be accepted by industry?

From: Markus Mottl (mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at)
Date: Mon Apr 17 2000 - 17:06:06 MET DST

  • Next message: Markus Mottl: "Re: standard library request: purely functional data structures"

    > That said, one excellent catalytic change, would be to bring in
    > seperate compilation library version dependency analysis (i.e an ocaml
    > 3rd party package manager) into the main ocaml distribution. I believe
    > there is an ocaml package to do this already, although I'm not sure
    > how sound it is.

    There are certainly a few "social" technologies that could significantly
    boost the usability of OCaml in real-world projects, a good version
    management tool for third party sources probably ranking among the "most
    missing" ones.

    I am highly convinced that the success of some "modern" (?) languages
    (Perl, Python, Java) was strongly supported by a (more or less) standard
    way of incorporating third-party libraries.

    The current state of OCaml is definitely advanced enough to pay more
    attention to some "not-so-academic" goals like providing for tools aimed at
    extending the user base. I believe this would benefit the whole process a
    lot in the future.

    > A library calculus system which was URL name space aware would be
    > particularly interesting. NetBSD and FreeBSD take this approach in
    > their own package source dependency system for instance. Compiling one
    > package recursively pulls in, uncompresses, patches, compilies and
    > installs the dependencies.

    It need not be an "overkill" version right from the beginning - a nice,
    clean and (important!) standard way to safely add, update and remove
    libraries would surely be a good start.

    > Such technology strongly fosters co-operative community.

    Taking a look at the Hump and Gerd's link database, I have the impression
    that there is already enough "critical mass" of contributors, but most of
    the contributions are "one-man-efforts", i.e. nice, but they don't have
    enough "punch". Maybe we should really think more about ways to "unleash
    the forces of cooperative development". As it seems: easily said, difficult
    to do...

    Best regards,
    Markus Mottl

    -- 
    Markus Mottl, mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at, http://miss.wu-wien.ac.at/~mottl
    



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Apr 17 2000 - 21:07:01 MET DST