> With that said, i do believe your opinion are often biased and tends
> peddle your products and website about OCaml.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Interestingly, Wolfram Research have used OCaml commercially as well.
> Granted, your study is specifically narrowed to OpenSource project
> queries. But there is still a fact about commercial, non-public use,
> which often are far more serious and important. Open Source projects
> are typically just happensances of some joe hacker's enthus about a
> lang, and open source products's audience is again often not with any
> serious considerations.
>
> For example, your report contains FFTW, Unison, Darcs. Unison is a bi-
> way file syncing tool, which i personally use daily. Darcs is a
> revision system for source code. FFTW, as i learned, is a lib for
> fourier transform. These tools, basically are results of some joe
> hacker who happens to love or use a particular lang. Their users,
> basically use them because there isn't others around (in the case of
> Darcs, because it uses a lang they like). The other tools listed in
> your report: MLDonkey, Free Tennis, Planets, HPodder, LEdit, Hevea,
> Polygen, i haven't checked what they are, but i think you'd agree they
> basically fit into my describtion about FFTW, Unison, Darcs above.
Some do but FFTW certainly does not. FFTW is the result of decades of work
by the world's foremost experts on the subject who received prestigious
awards for their ground breaking work. FFTW is such a tremendous
achievement that many commercial users, including The MathWorks for MATLAB,
have paid to incorporate FFTW into their commercial products under license
from MIT.
MLDonkey has been one of the most prolific file sharing utilities ever, and
is believed to have had ~250,000 users at its peak. LEdit is a widely used
tool for command line editing. Hevea is a widely used LaTeX to HTML
translator.
So some of these programs are fun toys (like Planets) but many are really
serious tools.
> «This led us to revisit the subject of Haskell's popularity and track
> record. We had reviewed Haskell last year in order to ascertain its
> commercial viability when we were looking to diversify into other
> functional languages. Our preliminary results suggested that Haskell
> was one of the most suitable functional languages but this recent news
> has brought that into question.»
>
> That remark is slightly off. You phrased ?Haskell's popularity and
> track record?, but note that your stat is just a measure of some pop
> tools among linux.
> It is a exageration to say that it's some sort of ?track record? of
> haskell like a damnatation. Haskell for example, has strong academic
> background.
While the vast majority of Haskell's use appears to be academic, I am not
even sure that it is fair to say that Haskell has a "strong academic
background".
> So, a fair ?track record? would also measure its academic
> use.
That is a question of perspective and I am interested in commercial
applications of these languages, of course.
> You also used the word ?popularity?. Again, popularity is a fuzzy
> word, but in general it also connate to mindshare. Between Haskell and
> OCaml, i doubt more programer heard or knows about OCaml than Haskell,
I agree.
> and as far as mindshare goes, both are dwarfed by Lisp.
I do not believe that.
> Then, you mentioned ?commercial viability?. Again, what tools happened
> to be cooked up by idle tech geekers in particular lang does not have
> much to do with ?commercial viability?.
I disagree. The direct commercialization of FFTW is the most obvious counter
example but many of the other tools have direct commercial counterparts.
> So, although i do find your report meaningful and has some force in
> indicating how OCaml is more used in terms of number of solid tools
> among idle programers, but i don't agree with your seemingly overboard
> conclusion that OCaml is actually some order of magnitude more used or
> popular than Haskell for serious projects.
The data speak for themselves, IMHO.
> This is a pure guess: i think any validity of OCaml's popularity in
> open source industrial use than Haskell is probably because OCaml has
> more industrial background than Haskell, given the lang's histories.
I certainly find the OCaml community to be very grounded in practicality and
the Haskell community to be intolerably theoretical.
