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Re: [Caml-list] Estimating the size of the ocaml community

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Jon Harrop

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Feb 20, 2005, 7:58:18 AM2/20/05
to caml...@yquem.inria.fr

I was just reading this presentation and stumbled upon some figures it
contains of the number of freshmeat projects written in different languages:

http://www.uclan.ac.uk/facs/destech/gradschool/autumnschool/thu11built-karlin2.pdf

According to this, just over a year ago (09/2003), OCaml was the 31st most
popular language with 22 projects.

Checking freshmeat now, OCaml is the 24th most popular language with 52
projects. Here's the full {language, projects} list:

{{C, 7066}, {Java, 3769}, {C++, 3523}, {Perl, 3300}, {PHP, 2947}, {Python,
1763}, {Unix Shell, 721}, {Tcl, 421}, {JavaScript, 409}, {SQL,
405}, {Objective C, 260}, {Other, 221}, {Assembly, 220}, {Ruby, 219}, {C#,
155}, {Other Scripting Engines, 125}, {Scheme, 111}, {Lisp, 81}, {PL/SQL,
78}, {Delphi, 74}, {Fortran, 62}, {Ada, 56}, {Common Lisp, 54}, {OCaml,
52}, {Emacs-Lisp, 51}, {Pascal, 48}, {Haskell, 48}, {Awk, 46}, {Zope,
41}, {Smalltalk, 33}, {ASP, 33}, {Visual Basic, 31}, {Basic, 30}, {Eiffel,
28}, {ML, 27}, {YACC, 24}, {Forth, 23}, {Cold Fusion,
20}, {Object Pascal, 19}, {Prolog, 18}, {Erlang, 18}, {Pike, 11}, {Lua,
11}, {Rexx, 10}, {Modula, 9}, {Groovy, 5}, {Logo, 4}, {Euphoria, 4}, {APL,
3}, {PROGRESS, 2}, {Pliant, 2}, {Dylan, 2}, {XBasic, 1}, {Simula,
1}, {REALbasic, 1}, {Euler, 1}}

I also computed the fractional increase in the number of projects for each
language to determine how rapidly languages have been adopted over the past
year. C# is 1st and OCaml is 2nd:

{{C#, 3.44444}, {OCaml, 2.36364}, {Objective C, 1.91176}, {Common Lisp,
1.86207}, {JavaScript, 1.74043}, {Haskell, 1.71429}, {Ruby,
1.71094}, {Java, 1.57304}, {Emacs-Lisp, 1.54545}, {Delphi, 1.48}, {Ada,
1.47368}, {Python, 1.47162}, {PHP, 1.43058}, {C++, 1.41999}, {Scheme,
1.40506}, {SQL, 1.38225}, {Fortran, 1.37778}, {Unix Shell,
1.30144}, {Other Scripting Engines, {}}, {PL/SQL, 1.27869}, {C,
1.28077}, {ASP, 1.26923}, {Pascal, 1.26316}, {Assembly, 1.24294}, {Lisp,
1.22727}, {Zope, 1.20588}, {Perl, 1.19392}, {Tcl, 1.17927}, {Awk,
1.15}, {Other, 0.840304}}

Considering that C# is pushed by Microsoft, Objective C is pushed by Apple and
LISP is pushed by Thomas Fischbacher ;-), I think this is very impressive.

I've also checked the number of unique posters to caml-list per month, which
has continued to rise exponentially since 1992, currently weighs in at 300
and is set to hit 1,000 in the year 2008.

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

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Thomas Fischbacher

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Feb 20, 2005, 9:06:51 AM2/20/05
to Jon Harrop, caml...@yquem.inria.fr

On Sun, 20 Feb 2005, Jon Harrop wrote:

> Considering that C# is pushed by Microsoft, Objective C is pushed by Apple and
> LISP is pushed by Thomas Fischbacher ;-), I think this is very impressive.

I don't think this mirrors the state of affairs in the LISP community
pretty well. ;-) At least, if you look at the authors of all the cl-*
packages in debian.

But of course, "fashion languages" that are pushed by companies primarily
for market share purposes - and not out of a deeper need - are an issue.
So to speak, every language tries to fix some problem. One barely can
resist the impression that the primary "problem" that C# tries to fix is
that Java is not controlled by Microsoft...

--
regards, t...@cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de (o_
Thomas Fischbacher - http://www.cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de/~tf //\
(lambda (n) ((lambda (p q r) (p p q r)) (lambda (g x y) V_/_
(if (= x 0) y (g g (- x 1) (* x y)))) n 1)) (Debian GNU)

Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons

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Feb 20, 2005, 11:27:22 AM2/20/05
to Jon Harrop, caml...@yquem.inria.fr
Bonjour

Jon Harrop a écrit :

> Checking freshmeat now, OCaml is the 24th most popular language with 52
> projects. Here's the full {language, projects} list:

[...]

> {OCaml, 52}, {Emacs-Lisp, 51}, {Pascal, 48}, {Haskell, 48}, {Awk,
> 46}, {Zope, 41}, {Smalltalk, 33}, {ASP, 33}, {Visual Basic, 31},
> {Basic, 30}, {Eiffel, 28}, {ML, 27}

Part of the 27 ML projects are in fact Caml projects.

Diego Olivier

Jon Harrop

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Feb 20, 2005, 9:17:05 PM2/20/05
to caml...@yquem.inria.fr
On Sunday 20 February 2005 16:18, Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons wrote:
> Part of the 27 ML projects are in fact Caml projects.

Indeed, the following twelve seem to be written in OCaml:

Unison, FFTW, MATHPLOT, WDialog, PXP, GeneWeb, SwiftSurf, FaCiLe, pxpvalidate,
Camlserv, Lazy-L and JSON.

I just had a look at sourceforge, which has far more projects (14,325 C,
14,813 C++ and 14,074 Java) by comparison, and the accredited language seems
to be wrong much more often. Assuming that all of the 132 SML projects are
actually in OCaml, this gives 155 projects OCaml, i.e. about two orders of
magnitude less common that the most popular languages.

Also, I think that web searches for "resume" and "CV" are likely to be
inaccurate. Searching for "written in *" seems more reasonable. This gives:

792,000 Java
636,000 C
424,000 Perl
312,000 C++
221,000 Python
92,900 C#
30,100 Ruby
20,300 Lisp
11,700 Scheme
5,240 ocaml
974 caml

Again, OCaml is about two orders of magnitude below the most popular
languages.

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

_______________________________________________

Erik de Castro Lopo

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Feb 21, 2005, 1:37:00 AM2/21/05
to caml...@yquem.inria.fr
On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 02:07:44 +0000
Jon Harrop <j...@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:

> On Sunday 20 February 2005 16:18, Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons wrote:
> > Part of the 27 ML projects are in fact Caml projects.
>
> Indeed, the following twelve seem to be written in OCaml:
>
> Unison, FFTW, MATHPLOT, WDialog, PXP, GeneWeb, SwiftSurf, FaCiLe, pxpvalidate,
> Camlserv, Lazy-L and JSON.

For FFTW, only a small part is written in O'Caml, a program which generates
optimized C codelets for the FFT butterflys.

The vast majority of FFTW is written in C.

Erik
--
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
Erik de Castro Lopo nos...@mega-nerd.com (Yes it's valid)
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
"I'll just say that having programmed in Lisp the shortcomings
of Java are glaringly obvious." -- Erann Gat

ste...@alum.mit.edu

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Feb 22, 2005, 12:11:51 AM2/22/05
to
Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> For FFTW, only a small part is written in O'Caml, a program which
generates
> optimized C codelets for the FFT butterflys.
>
> The vast majority of FFTW is written in C.

About 2/3 of FFTW is C, and about 1/3 (13000 lines) in O'Caml, not
including the generated C and asm code that forms the majority of the
distributed tarballs. So, the O'Caml portion is not terribly small.

Regards,
Steven G. Johnson

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