🚀 go-pugleaf

In comp.lang.functional Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au> wrote:
> Hmmm, do you think the maintainers of GNU Emacs ever considered XEmacs to
> be a competing project?  Do you think the maintainers of GNU Emacs were
> happy about that development split?  And do you think we ever would have
> gotten a user-friendly menu-driven GUI version of Emacs without it?

> Do you think the maintainers of GNU C ever considered EGCS to be a competing
> project?  Do you think they were happy with that development split?
> And do you think we would have a decent free C++ compiler now without it?

I am not sure whether we can compare these two developments with OCAML. I
would consider "OCAML" and most (all?) other functional languages as
quite "fragile": their "market share" is extremely small. If commercial
firms were allowed to just rip out all good stuff to brush up their
inferior products (in this case: Java compilers) this could well lead
to a problem. It could draw away the still low attention of the public.

If there is hardly any competition, this does not apply. E.g. I'd say
there is/was no real competition to Emacs - the split didn't hurt,
better: it helped the project. In the case of GNU C / EGCS: both are
just direct substitutes for commercial products and there are a lot of
better commercial C/C++-compilers. C/C++ (unfortunately?) wouldn't die
out if EGCS / GNU C ceased to exist. But if people used Java instead of
OCAML because of technology-transfer (OCAML->Java), I'd regard this as a
loss not only to the FP-community but to software development in general.

Best regards,
Markus Mottl

-- 
Markus Mottl, mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at, http://miss.wu-wien.ac.at/~mottl