Where do people see OCaml in the near future? Do you see the Ocaml spinning off a OCaml derivative that’s cleaner, easier, smaller and having one consistent standard library?
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I don’t see spinning off a new OCaml-like language as a useful move.
If you want a brand new community around OCaml with another shot at picking its own standards, you should check out Reason. The nice thing is that they’re doing all of this social engineering work, without having to abandon the existing technical qualities that makes OCaml so great. Picking a single standard library is about community standards, rather than about anything technical.
Now, OCaml should and is moving in the direction of getting cleaner and easier. There’s been a lot of good engineering work on the compiler and language in the last few years to fix some sharp corners in the module and type system, for example.
As to make OCaml “smaller”, I’m not in favor. I think OCaml needs to grow as a language, though that growth should of course be measured and thoughtful, and shouldn’t add unnecessary complexity.
But work on things like optimizations, debugging tools, profiling support, multicore runtimes, and language features like algebraic effects and modular implicits, have a lot of promise to make programming in OCaml net simpler and better.
Sure, there are some features I’d jettison if I could. But I don’t think it’s worth the churn in the language to do so in the near future.
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That has already been done its called F#
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Can you pls. elaborate a little bit?
And give some useful examples based on your experience of both worlds?