Re: [Caml-list] OCaml popularity

[Alwyn Goodloe <agoodloe@gradient.cis.upenn.edu>]

 I agree. This is really the difference between what most people do in
industry and what we do in academia. People out there just don't care
about how well you can build an automated theorem prover if they can't
draw their GUI screens and access their Oracle data bases. I think this is
why people will say it takes a while to be productive in OCAML. If you
want to read and write files, access the DB, and draw a screen, then you
probably have to go beyond most introductions to OCAML. Unfortunately,
most developers will just stop there. A book akin to the O Riley Java
networking book would be great as well. There is a lot of cool OCAML stuff
out there for networking - hopefully someone will write a book to spread
the news.

  On the other hand there really isn't a good intro to CS in OCAML book in
English. The good texts combiled with the DrScheme environmnet is a big
reason for the use of Scheme at many Universities in the US.

Alwyn

agoodloe@gradient.cis.upenn.edu

On Wed, 12 Mar 2003, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 08:02:30AM +1300, Graham Guttocks wrote:
> > Pierre Weis <pierre.weis@inria.fr> wrote:
> > >
> > > This may be the main drawback of Objective Caml: there is no
> > > ``Objective Caml for dummies''. That may be the price to pay to use
> > > a powerful and theoretically well-founded language.
> >
> > Do you mean that such a book could not be written, or simply that it
> > just has not been written yet?  I personally would like to see an
> > ``Objective Caml for dummies'' as the available introductory material
> > (in English) is pretty poor IMO.
>
> Someone else actually said it well on this list a while back. There
> is no "Programming Perl"-equivalent for OCaml.
>
> And please don't start by telling me about the lambda calculus or
> higher-order functions.
>
> Start by telling me how to read and write files. How to draw a nice
> picture. Go on to tell me how to access my SQL database from an
> OCaml application server.
>
> Rich.
>
> --
> Richard Jones, Red Hat Inc. (London, UK) http://www.redhat.com/software/ccm
> http://www.annexia.org/ Freshmeat projects: http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj
> PTHRLIB is a library for writing small, efficient and fast servers in C.
> HTTP, CGI, DBI, lightweight threads: http://www.annexia.org/freeware/pthrlib/
>
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