[Shootout-list] advocacy or curiousity?

[Brian Hurt]

On Mon, 27 Sep 2004, Isaac Gouy wrote:

> Once more: advocacy or curiousity?

I vote for curiosity.  I'm an Ocaml advocate as well- but I learned Ocaml 
because of the original shootout.  And, while I like Ocaml better than any 
other language I've looked at, I don't want to shut the debate down.  
There might be a language I like better than Ocaml out there, and I just 
haven't heard of it yet.  

The problem I have with Brandon's proposal to limit the number of 
languages in the shootout is that I can't think of a criteria which would 
exclude any language currently on the list, but include Ocaml.  Brandon 
basically stated which languages he wanted to benchmark- Java, C++, C#, 
and Ocaml.  Which of these languages is not like the others?  One of them 
does not have a huge user community, major corporations backing 
it's development and marketing, running feet of books at the local 
bookstore, magazines at the local magazine kiosk, and broad industry 
"acceptance".  These are things I hope will get fixed, but as I write 
them, Ocaml is not a "serious language".

So why include Ocaml and not SML?  Or Haskell?  Or Scheme?  Or any of a 
dozen other languages in the same boat as Ocaml?  Heck, based on various 
attributes of 'seriousness', I could write a standard that would have us 
including Lisp, Python, and Perl, but still not including Ocaml.

But I'm glad you included Ocaml.  The shootout was of more value to me 
because it included Ocaml- and dozens of other languages- than it would 
have been if it didn't.

So I say- the criteria for being included in the benchmark should be it
should run on the target system, and someone needs ot be willing to write
the tests for it.  If someone comes along and writes the tests for
Intercal, befunge, unlambda, or brainfuck, they should be included too.  
Yeah, they're joke languages.  So?  They can all compete for the title of
worst programming language.  In fact, I could see this being valuable- for
humor value if nothing else.

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Brian