Re: more ideas (Re: [Caml-list] how could the community help with Oasis-DB;) towards a CPAN for OCaml?

[Gerd Stolpmann <info@gerd-stolpmann.de>]

Am Dienstag, den 13.12.2011, 21:22 +0100 schrieb oliver:
> Hello,
> 
> 
> I again want to mention R.
> 
> The installation procdure for users is very easy.
> What I also like there, is that the documentation
> includes references to books, which explain the algorithms
> or other background information.
> Maybe thats too much of what is needed for OCaml.
> 
> But it's what I do like there.
> 
> Also R-packages necessarily need to be documented,
> have a manpage / package description.
> 
> Not sure if this is necessary with OCaml stuff,
> because *.mli files are there, and ocamlc -i could
> print the interfaces of the modules, if nothing else is there
> to rely on.
> But maybe these kinds of minimalistic documentation-generation
> could be created automatically by the installing tools.
> 
> Nicely printed html-docs for interfaces are very helpful.
> 
> And also nice would be, to have such nicely printed documentation
> also available at the server, even before downloading any packages.
> So, browsing a package documentation online could be done
> before downloading the package.

docs.camlcity.org

Gerd

> 
> The type system and module system would make it su much superior
> to languages like Perl, Python or others.
> 
> It's always a fun to read the interface docs at the OCaml manual,
> or that are provided by other OCaml-projects online, compared to
> what any other language offers.
> 
> But for some very big libraries a meta_documentation,
> something like a mini-tuorial, an overview on how to
> easily jump into the usage of big library would make sense to.
> 
> Something like a hierarchical view of how the modules can be used,
> because some modules may provide types that are used by other modules.
> If it's displayed hierarchically and graphgically, it could save much time
> looking at all kinds of modules, which maybe will never be needed.
> 
> Of course I also think that there should be some docs that explain in some words,
> what the module and it's function do.
> When exploring ocamlgraph some weeks ago, I saw a interface doc,
> but it was not obvious what kind of functionality each function offers,
> or how to find a function that offered, what I was looking for.
> 
> Via #ocaml I could get hints to the functions I needed, and it then worked
> out of the box. But I would not have found it by myself.
> So, maybe even some kind of keyword tagging to a provided function
> would be fine.
> 
> 
> Also what I like in the R community, is that there is a journal,
> that offers articles on R, but also on statistics.
> I know, there are a lot of blogs around OCaml, some company-driven,
> some private.
> 
> But the R journal for R is really something that is an eye-catcher.
> Downloadable as pdf. So if I want to have it on paper, I can have
> high quality doc.
> 
> Current issue of R-journal:
> 
>   http://journal.r-project.org/current.html
> 
> There also is the R-Meta-Blogger-Site R-Bloggers:
> 
>   http://www.r-bloggers.com/
> 
> Of course R has a much much bigger community than OCaml.
> 
> But I think, just bringing in some more ideas could make sense here.
> 
> If this makes sense to OCaml / OCaml community or not,
> I don't know. But at least I think the R-community is
> somehow inspiring.
> 
> Just my 3.3 KiB
> 
> Ciao,
>    Oliver
>