Ocaml/Michelson developer on-boarding/transitioning

Hi,

As an enthusiastic community member, it is without a shadow of a doubt, the things that hold Tezos back are a grave concern. One of the main drawbacks Tezos is facing is the lack of developers in Ocaml/Michelson. Not only are Ocaml developers scarce, but they are also very expensive.

I have come up with a plan to alleviate this problem, however, the only issue with my planning is the transitioning/onboarding phase for new trainees to be supported and accommodated by Tezos developers to settle in.

If this is something that anybody in Tezos can help with, i.e. transitioning newly trained ocaml developers into learning on the job, working on the tezos protocol, please let me know.

Thank you

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I dont think that you need OCaml developers specifically. Sure, Ligo is pretty similar but there is also Smartpy and Archetype. Any exposure to functional programming should do. The change to smart contract programming and the necessary financial knowledge is most likely far more challenging than learning pattern matching over sum types.
Now there are also those cardano programmers that should have little trouble adapting.

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You need Ocaml devs for core development, yes. SC programming is challenging but not a big hurdle.

Nevertheless, your comment reiterates my concern of providing a gateway to work alongside teams to develop into a key developer at tezos.

Maybe share your plan how to alleviate “this problem” first before you throw accusations.
Honestly with a rise in price all kind of developers will come and get attracted/interested. If a rise in pirce happens - thats another question though

Not sure how you can imply any accusation. It is not progressive to turn a beneficial post into a toxic one.

Thank you

Forget Michelson, you don’t need to know Michelson to become a core developer except of course if you want to work on the Michelson runtime. Apart from this, I agree that OCaml developers are not as easy to find as programmers for the most mainstream languages and onboarding newcomers to work on the Tezos protocol takes time. What is your plan to alleviate the problem exactly?

Hi Rafoo,
The plan is not wizardry, I have access to functional programmers that would be interested. But this requires on-boarding help.

What big problems do you see with core development that could be solved by more manpower?

As an enthusiastic community member, it is without a shadow of a doubt, the things that hold Tezos back are a grave concern. One of the main drawbacks Tezos is facing is the lack of developers in Ocaml/Michelson.

It is quite clear that the number of dapps on Tezos is struggling, in the future this will change.

However, an approach that I feel should happen is there should be an incubator team, that helps quite strongly, dapps that want to build on tezos. This is because Tezos is built on Michelson, which is a lower level language and often not easy for developers.

Giving out grants alone has always proven (not just for tezos) to be quite inefficient

But dapps are not written in OCaml or Michelson.

This here is trying to create non existent problem. There is a shortage of dapp devs for tezos but its not because of Michelson. Maybe dont report my posts this time only because it hurts you because as you can see it got restored.

You are contradicting yourself, you first wrote "SC programming is challenging but not a big hurdle."
And now that dapps are strugglin because of Michelson.

You can of course write in Michelson but why? Just use a high level language for smart contracts like SmartPy or Ligo. There are also plenty of ressources available to start. For someone expwerienced with Python or JS this should be not hard to get started. Noone does SC in Michelson.

There are also websites that try to add all existing ressources in one place also dev tools like https://exploretezos.com/
Everyone can ask the team to add tools that are not there yet, this is something that can help I believe.

Hackathons are also a way and currently we got the new Gitcoin hackathons and the plenty hackathon:

Thank you for your provocative tone.
Something challenging doesn’t mean it is a hurdle, you need to take English classes.

If you think compilers are a holy grail, I can’t help you :slight_smile: