Top ten most popular OCaml programs

[Jon Harrop]

Following the recent discussion about real world applications of
statically-typed functional programming languages, I compiled a list of the
top ten most popular applications written in OCaml according to the Debian
and Ubuntu package popularity contests:

http://ocamlnews.blogspot.com/2007/12/top-10-most-popular-ocaml-programs.html

We previously found that OCaml, Haskell and Erlang are the most popular
general-purpose functional programming languages on Linux:

http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/most-popular-functional-languages-on.html

In this context, it is interesting to note that OCaml has been used to
create an unusually diverse range of popular applications compared to other
functional languages:

Scheme:
festival (72,623 installs)
nothing else with >1,000 installs

Common Lisp:
maxima (7,248 installs)
nothing else with >1,000 installs

Haskell:
darcs (3,169 installs)
dfsbuild (474 installs)

Erlang:
no packages on record

Even some of the more mainstream languages like Ruby have been used to
create surprisingly few popular applications:

Ruby:
apt-listbugs (30,260 installs)
alexandria (3,467 installs)
apt-listbugs (2,596 installs)

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

[Jack Mollier]

On Dec 30, 6:32 am, Jon Harrop <use...@jdh30.plus.com> wrote:
> Following the recent discussion about real world applications of
> statically-typed functional programming languages, I compiled a list of the
> top ten most popular applications written in OCaml according to the Debian
> and Ubuntu package popularity contests:
>

> http://ocamlnews.blogspot.com/2007/12/top-10-most-popular-ocaml-progr...

>
> We previously found that OCaml, Haskell and Erlang are the most popular
> general-purpose functional programming languages on Linux:
>

> http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/most-popular-functional-la...

>
> In this context, it is interesting to note that OCaml has been used to
> create an unusually diverse range of popular applications compared to other
> functional languages:
>
> Scheme:
> festival (72,623 installs)
> nothing else with >1,000 installs
>
> Common Lisp:
> maxima (7,248 installs)
> nothing else with >1,000 installs
>
> Haskell:
> darcs (3,169 installs)
> dfsbuild (474 installs)
>
> Erlang:
> no packages on record

Note that two of the top ten OCaml projects on the page you referenced
have fewer than 1000 installs. Note further that, even including
those two, the total installs of OCaml software is 26,151, far lower
than the numbers for just one Scheme project.

OCaml and F# may be the greatest languages since Brainf*ck but your
constant barrage of marketing posts on technical newsgroups is very
off putting to a lurker like myself.

Jack

[Dr Jon D Harrop]

On 30 Dec 2007, 17:20, Jack Mollier <jack.moll...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Note that two of the top ten OCaml projects on the page you
> referenced have fewer than 1000 installs.  Note further that, even
> including those two, the total installs of OCaml software is
> 26,151, far lower than the numbers for just one Scheme project.

Someone pointed out that I had not included FFTW (for some reason the
Debian package database doesn't realise it was written in OCaml). FFTW
alone has 143,802 installs, more than all of the other languages that
I listed combined.

So OCaml not only has far more separate pieces of software to its name
but also far more users. I found this very interesting, particularly
in the context of all the unsubstantiated hooting about Haskell that's
been going on recently...

Cheers,
Jon.