hi Jon Harrop,

[ “Haskell's virginity” by Jon Harrop
http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/haskells-virginity.html
(a report on OCaml and Haskell use in linux)
]

First, i like to thank you for the informative study on particular
aspect of OCaml and Haskell popularity. I think it is informative, and
the effort of your report in to some degree non-trivial.

With that said, i do believe your opinion are often biased and tends
peddle your products and website about OCaml.

In particular, i don't think the conclusion you made, about how OCaml
is one order of magnitude more use in the industry, being valid.

For example, many commercial use of languages are not public. As a
example, Wolfram Research, the maker of Mathematica, sells more
Mathematica than any lisp companies combined.
This can be gathered from company size and financial records. However,
if you go by your methods, such as polling stats from linux distros,
or other means of checking stats among open source communities, you
won't find any indication of this.

xahlee@gmail.com wrote:

I certainly do peddle our products whenever possible. However, the data I
presented are verifiable and I would encourage anyone interested to repeat
the analysis themselves. There are many caveats in doing so but I think any
reasonable study will come to the same conclusion because the data are so
clear in this case.

That was not my conclusion! I was careful to say that this refers only to
open source software (having examined two major Linux distros). I added
that this undermines my confidence in using Haskell commercially but that
is a personal opinion and not a justifiable conclusion.

xahlee@gmail.com wrote:

I believe WRI sell products over several orders of magnitude range in cost
so I don't understand how you could have done that analysis.