OCaml vs Haskell [was Re: What do you LISPers think of Haskell?]

hi Jon Harrop,

[ “Haskell's virginity� by Jon Harrop
http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2...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.

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.
Namely, some hobby programers happened to create a software that does
X well above others, thus other hobby programers who happens to need
it, use them.

(the above is quickly written, i'm sure there are many flaws to pick
as i phrased it, but i think you get the idea)

In your report, you made a sort of conclusion as this:

«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. So, a fair “track record� would also measure its academic
use.
You also used the word “popularity�. Again, popularity is afuzzy
word, but in general it also connate to mindshare. Between Haskell and
OCaml, i doubt more programer heard or knows about OCaml than Haskell,
and as far as mindshare goes, both are dwarfed by Lisp.

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�.

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.

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.

------------------

On a tangent, many here accuse you being a troll. As i mentioned, i do
find your posts tends to be divisive and selling your website, but
considered on the whole of newsgroup's posts in particular by many
regulars, i think your posting behavior overall are in any sense
particularly bad.

Recently, i answered to a post used your name and your photo in
group.goople.com's profile. When i answered that post, i thought it
was from you. Thanks for letting me know otherwise.

(See:

Fake Jon Harrop post
http://groups.google.com/group/comp....f971ff443e2ce5

Fake Jon Harrop profile
http://groups.google.com/groups/prof...gpE8SFMrQg3Ptg
)

I think many tech geekers on newsgroups are just ignorant fuckfaces.
The guy who fake'd your identity, to the degree of using your photo in
his fake profile, perhaps thinks he's being humorous.

Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

On Aug 27, 9:23 am, Jon Harrop <j...@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
> parnell wrote:
> >>You appear to have neglected the Ubuntu popularity contest that account
> >>for an order of magnitude more people again.
>
> > True, Ubuntu has 683367 submissions. The data gets murkier once you
> > pick through it for instance the FFTW data that you cite
> > vote old recent no files
> > Package: fftw3 139 9884 27 165142
>
> > Where
> > vote - number of people who use this package regularly;
> > old - number of people who installed, but don't use this package
> > regularly;
> > recent - number of people who upgraded this package recently;
> > no-files - number of people whose entry didn't contain enough
> > information
> > (atime and ctime were 0).
>
> > So although we have ~185,000 installs of FFTW only 139 of those
> > installs are "used".
>
> The fftw3 package transitioned to libfftw3-3 a year ago:
>
> http://people.debian.org/~igloo/popc...?packages=fftw....
> libfftw3-3&show_installed=on&want_ticks=on&from_date=&to_da te=&hlght_date
> =&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1
>
> So you have analysed data about the wrong package.
>
> > Surly some of the "no files" set must be used so if we use the ratio
> > of vote to old we come up with 2,322 more that most likely should be
> > in the "vote" column.
>
> The old package is now largely unused now that the transition is complete,
> yes.
>
> > You analysis of the data was not in any way thorough, your portrayal of
> > the data and the conclusions you draw about haskell on this list and in
> > your article are misleading.
>
> Let's just review the correct data from Ubuntu:
>
> rank name inst vote old recent no-files
> 1735 libfftw3-3 104150 9084 77412 8288 9366
> 7652 darcs 2998 271 2634 92 1
>
> As you can see, the "recent" column shows an even larger discrepancy: FFTW
> has two orders of magnitude more recent installs than Darcs (8,288 vs 92)..
>
> Please do continue trying to disprove my findings or try to build a
> similarly objective and statistically meaningful study that contracts these
> results. I have actually tried to do this myself but I am only finding more
> and more data that substantiate my original conclusion that Haskell is not
> yet a success in this context.
>
> For example, MLDonkey alone is still seeing tens of thousands of downloads
> every month from SourceForge:
>
> http://sourceforge.net/project/stats...oup_id=156414&
> ugn=mldonkey&type=prdownload&mode=12months&package _id=0
>
> I cannot find any software written in Haskell that gets within an order of
> magnitude of that.
>
> --
> Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancyhttp://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?u

xahlee@gmail.com wrote:
> 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.

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?u

xahlee@gmail.com wrote:
> 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.

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.

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?u