Why Lean 4 replaced OCaml as my Primary Language

[gasche]

@Gopiandcode

It is developing actively certainly, but as a developer who was a) active in the community, and b) would have been keen to contribute to the language, the ecosystem is substantially harder to make a useful contribution to in comparsion to lean. most of the interesting additions to the library occur primarily in offline meetups it seems at INRIA/JaneStreet, and are lead by teams of one or two people. […] Certainly the expertise required to contribute to the Lean compiler might be the same, but the discussions are public, the Lean FRO holds public office hours regarding compiler development and language updates

It pains me to read this. I don’t want this to be true, but this is also a perception of OCaml development that is not uncommon, several people have made similar remarks before so you are certainly onto something. One thing that is disheartening is that you are not representative of a complete newcomer in the community, for example you were invited to chair the OCaml Workshop this year, which is a clear form of recognition. If someone in your position feels unable to approach maintainers to offer contributions, what of newcomers?

I’m happy to keep working on improving this within the limits of time available. Your post motivated me to restart the compiler-newsletter which may be a way to share knowledge of what is going on. We could give office hours a shot (I should probably wait until @octachron is back from holidays) for a few weeks; @Gopiandcode and @giltho, when do you think would be a good time for office hours? Do you have other suggestions to make it easier to contribute?

We also have github/ocaml triaging meetings every two weeks that are open to anyone, see this document for relevant information. (Participating to these meetings has a risk of you ending up with issues or PRs assigned.)

@Gopiandcode

Consider modular explicits? is there anything that a developer joining the community at this point could actually do to help that become part of the language?

I wrote [PR#14048](manual: document modular explicits by gasche · Pull Request #14048 · ocaml/ocaml · GitHub) to document modular explicits. Anyone could have done it – it requires understanding the design (and my understanding evolved from public discussions on the PR as I missed various things of course), and then some technical writing.

We’re in this weird situation where maintainers do a lot of stuff that is time-consuming because no one else does it, and then other people find that they don’t know what to do.