]> On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 01:44:40PM +0000, Dawid Toton wrote: > Is there any hope for a grand 'OCaml 4' release that would iron out the > last ugly spots left in the language with some breaking changes? No no no, this is a really bad idea for a few reasons. (1) Perl 6 and Python 3. Python 3 is even very conservative (compared to the ongoing complete rewrite that is Perl 6), but even there just about no one is going to move to Python 3 in the immediate future because it requires maintaining two incompatible versions of all your code. The OCaml community has far fewer resources available than the Perl and Python communities, and doesn't need extra make-work. (2) Everyone would need to agree on what the new language would look like, what features it would and wouldn't have. Good luck with that. (3) The language is fine as it is, and many syntactic changes can be made using camlp4 anyway and don't require any changes to the compiler. It's the slow, boring, steady work that's going to pay off. Make the tools better. Write more documentation and tutorials. Fix the website[*]. Mirror much more content on mirror.ocamlcore.org and/or set up a CPAN-like repository of tarballs. Make the mega- releases for package-challenged beginners (what's happening to Batteries?) Make GODI work really well on Windows. Package more stuff in MacPorts ... Rich. [*] INRIA: Are you interested in handling control of http://ocaml.org to OcamlCore? I think we (Red Hat) can kick in some money to pay a graphic designer and a user interface specialist to work on a good looking site that appeals to beginners and directs people to the necessary resources. -- Richard Jones Red Hat