Re: [Sml-implementers] SML IDE as language promotion

[Nick B. <Nic...@po...>]

At 2005-03-11 20:52:29+0000, Alexandre writes:

> I just re-read article "Why no one use functional languages" (you can  
> find it here:  
> http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/sigplan-why/sigplan- 
> why.ps).
> 
> At that article you might notice absolutely fair notice about tools (no  
> one will encouraged to use new language without good tools). I hope you  
> will agree, that IDE is really useful and important tool, but I can't  
> find such a tool for an SML. There is Eclipse development for Haskell,  
> OCaml (which actually has already they own native IDE), but not for  
> SML, while there are so many implementations and developers of SML  
> Language.
> 
> Don't you think that such a good tools will "promote" language and  
> probably gives more "forces" (people) for the language?
> 
> What about some type of collaboration to bring new developer tools to  
> the users?

Disclaimer: I was an MLWorks staff member for several years at
Harlequin; you can blame me for the runtime, the GC, the profiler,
application delivery, and some other stuff.

No, I don't think that tools make much difference at all.  There are
graphical IDEs available for (say) Perl and Python.  I do most of my
programming in those two languages these days, but I don't use the
IDEs and I don't know anyone who does.  So I don't think the
availability of 'tools' has had anything to do with the popularity of
those languages.  They have become popular because they make it easy
to get the job done.

Taking Python as an example, it is easy to get the job done in Python
because (a) it includes a huge library of really useful modules, (b)
it's trivial to interface it with third-party libraries written in
whatever language, (c) it has a good read/eval/print TTY interface,
and the library includes a good TTY debugger.  There are other
reasons, but these three are the basics.  The language itself is OK
(but not great; it's no SML).

Having said all that:

If the SML community wants a graphical IDE for SML, MLWorks is still
owned by Xanalys, I believe.  Various companies have acquired residual
assets of Harlequin from the Global Graphics/Xanalys companies
(DylanWorks went to Functional Objects, we at Ravenbrook bought the
MPS, LispWorks has just been bought up by the Xanalys Lispers to form
LispWorks Limited).  Our experience suggests to me that MLWorks could
be 'liberated' to open source for the legal costs (maybe a few
thousand USD).  Maybe one day Ravenbrook will do this if nobody else
does it in the meantime.  I'd like to tinker with the profiler some
more.

Nick Barnes
Director
Ravenbrook Limited