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Semantic patching with CoccinelleSemantic patching with CoccinellePosted Jan 22, 2009 6:49 UTC (Thu) by njs (guest, #40338)In reply to: Semantic patching with Coccinelle by rwmj Parent article: Semantic patching with Coccinelle
No-one's saying that people *shouldn't* learn OCaml, or even that they personally don't wish to learn OCaml, just that in practice most of the people in the programming world perceive OCaml as exotic and do not learn it -- for whatever reason.
Writing in a niche language *can* have the opposite effect on finding contributors, though. Darcs for instance benefited quite a bit from being written in Haskell, because there were many people who had learned the language out of interest and really wanted to work on something in Haskell, but not many real-world projects to go around. Its competitors were written in better known languages, but their potential contributor base was correspondingly diluted by all the other projects also written in those languages...
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This effect does exist but it's short-lived... Posted Jan 22, 2009 10:29 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Yes, darcs benefited for a time from the fact that it could attract all these people - but the end result was the same: when C crowd got it's shiny new bauble (Git) all other projects were left in dust... Sometimes it's good idea to use non-mainstream language because it's the only way to produce something and you don't need many contributors: one of the most popular DFT library (FFTW) is written in OCaml (well, kinda). But it does limit number of potential contributors! No way to avoid this...
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