Re: Growth of the CAML family of languages

Xah Lee wrote:
You say in other post in this thread that the word "lisp" by itself
alsoo refers to speech impediment. That's true, but if you google
search on "lisp", the first 5 pages all refers to lisp the language,
none refers to lisp the speech defect.

I get 3/10 non-CL results on the first page. YMMV. Regardless, there is a
difference between how often terms are searching for and how many results
are returned. Google Trends measures the former:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/trends/about.html

honestly, i personally don't think Ocmal is more popular than Haskell,

Agreed. Haskell has grown thanks to several books being published recently
as well as O'Reilly's announcement of a new one.

and Haskell is far less popular than Lisp.

By most metrics they are comparable: well within an order of magnitude. They
all have similar numbers of projects on Freshmeat, for example:

http://freshmeat.net/browse/160/

8,841 C
5,800 Java
4,856 C++
4,280 PHP
3,784 Perl
2,908 Python
1,066 JavaScript
1,012 Unix Shell
546 SQL
500 Tcl
438 Ruby
382 Objective C
304 C#
294 Other
256 Assembly
165 Other Scripting Engines
148 Scheme
96 PL/SQL
92 Lisp
89 OCaml
84 Fortran
80 Delphi
75 Haskell
64 Ada
64 Common Lisp
60 Emacs-Lisp
59 Pascal
54 Awk
51 Zope
47 ASP
45 Visual Basic
39 Lua
37 Basic
34 Eiffel
33 ML

Note that there are many overlaps where projects are classified as both Lisp
and Common Lisp, so you cannot add the two numbers.

Google fights for "written in *" indicates that they are in the same order
of magnitude:

C: 1,380,000
C#: 450,000
Lisp: 58,300
Haskell: 34,300
Common Lisp: 27,500
OCaml: 23,800

A plausible reason for this
is that lisp(s) has been around for about 4 decades, and there are a
lot lisp code that are still relevant today. While Haskell, OCaml,
are very young, are predominently academic and used in esoteric niche
markets. (often just a few exemplary cases cited by the lang's
websites)

Actually, the CAML family of languages are already widely used in industry:

Microsoft have a considerable investment in the CAML family of languages.
Their third-party driver verification software is written in OCaml. Their
next major language on the .NET platform, F#, is a CAML derivative.
Microsoft make extensive use of both OCaml and F# internally. For example,
Microsoft trust the $2bn advertising market on MSN Live to F# code.

Intel also make significant use of OCaml for hardware verification in their
billion dollar chip market.

The FFT routines in MATLAB are written in OCaml and The MathWorks sell
add-ons written in SML.

Canon, Philips, Boeing, Sun, Lockheed-Martin and various other large
companies are among our customers, all of whom use OCaml in industry.

We also have dozens of smaller companies among our customers including
XenSource, whose value-add over the free edition of Xen is largely a
distributed, cross-platform management tool stack written in OCaml. They
recently sold to Citrix for $500M.

Jane St. Capital have over 20 OCaml programmers working in offices around
the world on finance. They recently expanded with a new office in London.
Several other financial houses use functional programming languages
extensively. Outside ML, Haskell is also popular in the financial sector
following a seminal paper by Simon Peyton-Jones.

So I would not say that OCaml is "predominantly academic". In fact, I think
you'll be hard-pressed to find similarly large-scale and recent adoptions
of Lisp in industry.

Common Lisp itself, is actually going thru a lot growth in the past 5
years starting post-doc-com.

Really? I was under the impression that Lisp had barely grown at all
recently:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=common+lisp%2Clisp

Emacs lisp is interesting, in that it is one of those quite language
without a zealot community (other example in this class are
JavaScript, PHP), and is constantly sneered by both Common Lispers and
Schemers, yet is probably the lang that had the most practical impact
to programers in introducing Lisp as well as functional programing,
and being a practical tool who's popularity far exceeds all other
lisps combined.

True.

Further readings:

· Computer Language Popularity Trend
http://xahlee.org/lang_traf/index.html

I think the number of posts on usenet does not correlate with language
popularity. For example, the JavaScript newsgroup gets roughly as many
posts as c.l.lisp yet JavaScript sells 100x as many books.

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

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