I learned caml in France during my studies, as stated in the article. But it's far from being the language "everyone teaches in french schools". It's only taught in a specific specialization (computer science) before engineering school, so that's about 1000-2000 students every year.
I never understood this. OCaml is a world-class language, if the French threw the weight of their education system behind it, mandated it as the language for government IT work to build a critical mass, they would have a killer advantage. But I guess the demise of Le Minitel has made them afraid of home-grown technologies, it is a huge missed opportunity.
It's the same as if the British government had had the foresight to back the Acorn ecosystem. We would be 15-20 years ahead of where we are now. An Archimedes on every desktop...
Small personal story as a former french cs student :
I remember my thought when i was taught oCaml : we had to recode ocaml type inference, in ocaml. The teacher was really satisfied in the end , saying things like « that’s good ! Now you see, type inference is like a theorem proof ». It took me ten years to understand what i did this day, and what my teacher meant.
When i was a student, i wanted to program videogames ( like many cs student i suppose), so all this research and very theoretical concerns were very very remote from my interest. Ocaml was a weird thing that had very little to do with my future everyday job.
And now i start to look at F# for web development, thinking that the whole stuff is just beautiful.
Why do you say Minitel was so bad? From an outside perspective it is brilliant. It was late '90s before the internet had anything like the penetration of Minitel. Arguably, the French should have continued inovating Minitel. Re-written the terminal software in OCaml.
I never understood this. OCaml is a world-class language, if the French threw the weight of their education system behind it, mandated it as the language for government IT work to build a critical mass, they would have a killer advantage. But I guess the demise of Le Minitel has made them afraid of home-grown technologies, it is a huge missed opportunity.
It's the same as if the British government had had the foresight to back the Acorn ecosystem. We would be 15-20 years ahead of where we are now. An Archimedes on every desktop...