Re: A labltk book?

Re: A labltk book?

[Jeff Shaw]

This thread was quite derailed... should I then assume there's very 
little interest in such a book?

Re: [Caml-list] Re: A labltk book?

[Jon Harrop]

On Monday 15 October 2007 17:42:39 Jeff Shaw wrote:
> This thread was quite derailed... should I then assume there's very
> little interest in such a book?

I think there would be far more interest in an introductory book on OCaml 
published as cheaply as possible through someone like O'Reilly, that includes 
a chapter on GUI programming. Or a IDE that makes it as easy as possible to 
get started with OCaml that might be written using Tk.

Just my 2p...

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e

Re: [Caml-list] Re: A labltk book?

[Matt Gushee]

Jon Harrop wrote:
> On Monday 15 October 2007 17:42:39 Jeff Shaw wrote:
>> This thread was quite derailed... should I then assume there's very
>> little interest in such a book?
> 
> I think there would be far more interest in an introductory book on OCaml 
> published as cheaply as possible through someone like O'Reilly, that includes 
> a chapter on GUI programming. Or a IDE that makes it as easy as possible to 
> get started with OCaml that might be written using Tk.

Could be ... some time ago (2 years, maybe?) I proposed the idea of (me) 
writing a book on LablTk; there was very little response, favorable or 
otherwise, but at least one person thought it would be nice to have a 
book on GUI programming in OCaml, perhaps including LablTk but with 
greater emphasis on LablGTK. Even if I had agreed with the idea, at that 
time I had little experience with (Labl)GTK. But I don't agree with the 
idea: you could write a book about GUI *design*, but that should be 
neither toolkit-specific nor language-specific. On the other hand, a 
book about GUI programming techniques in a specific language will 
probably appeal mainly to people with specific projects in mind, which 
implies that they probably want to learn one good GUI toolkit ... which 
in the case of OCaml would have to be LablGTK.

I realize Tk is progressing and making some much-wanted improvements, 
but to me it seems like too little, too late.

As for Jon's idea, sure, great! But I wonder if any major publisher 
would take it on. After all, O'Reilly *has* an introductory OCaml book; 
it would need to be updated and translated, but that's still much easier 
than creating a new one. Yet they don't seem interested in doing that. 
So some brave soul might have to self-publish something.

-- 
Matt Gushee
: Bantam - lightweight file manager : matt.gushee.net/software/bantam/ :
: RASCL's A Simple Configuration Language :     matt.gushee.net/rascl/ :

Re: [Caml-list] Re: A labltk book?

[skaller]

On Tue, 2007-10-16 at 18:36 -0600, Matt Gushee wrote:

> As for Jon's idea, sure, great! But I wonder if any major publisher 
> would take it on. After all, O'Reilly *has* an introductory OCaml book; 
> it would need to be updated and translated, but that's still much easier 
> than creating a new one. Yet they don't seem interested in doing that. 
> So some brave soul might have to self-publish something.

Well, Jon already has published something. I think the days
of paper publishers struggling to get ANY content at all are over.
Large numbers of well respected mathematics titles are now permanently
out of print. Despite the fact that printing is now extremely cheap,
publishing is all about marketing and large scale sales: that's
where the main costs are.

For any kind of title with a small market, distributing paper
via major channels just isn't worth it.

Jon has done this the right way. If I were to write an Ocaml
book now I'd be asking Jon to publish it.

-- 
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net>
Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net

Re: [Caml-list] Re: A labltk book?

[Dave Benjamin]

Matt Gushee wrote:
> I realize Tk is progressing and making some much-wanted improvements, 
> but to me it seems like too little, too late.

I generally agree with this sentiment, but having just produced a GTK 
application that I could not, within reason, port to Mac OS X, I think 
Tk still has a slight edge when it comes to portability. I do hope that 
GTK support on Mac improves; I love lablgtk2.

Dave

Re: [Caml-list] Re: A labltk book?

[Jon Harrop]

On Wednesday 17 October 2007 03:33:15 skaller wrote:
> Jon has done this the right way. If I were to write an Ocaml
> book now I'd be asking Jon to publish it.

We are certainly interested in publishing books on functional programming. 
However, we could not turn a profit if the final cost was significantly lower 
than that of OCaml for Scientists.

Wiley are publishing F# for Scientists and they made it clear from the outset 
that they are interested in OCaml books. They even proposed that I write a 
second edition of OCaml for Scientists and publish it through them.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e

Re: [Caml-list] Re: A labltk book?

[Jon Harrop]

On Wednesday 17 October 2007 01:36:34 Matt Gushee wrote:
> Could be ... some time ago (2 years, maybe?) I proposed the idea of (me)
> writing a book on LablTk; there was very little response, favorable or
> otherwise, but at least one person thought it would be nice to have a
> book on GUI programming in OCaml, perhaps including LablTk but with
> greater emphasis on LablGTK. Even if I had agreed with the idea, at that
> time I had little experience with (Labl)GTK. But I don't agree with the
> idea: you could write a book about GUI *design*, but that should be
> neither toolkit-specific nor language-specific. On the other hand, a
> book about GUI programming techniques in a specific language will
> probably appeal mainly to people with specific projects in mind, which
> implies that they probably want to learn one good GUI toolkit ... which
> in the case of OCaml would have to be LablGTK.

I'll write OCaml Journal articles covering GUI programming using LablGTK. 
There is already one very nice example in there (Sudoku solver) but there's 
plenty of scope for more complicated applications with more widgets, 
threading and so forth.

> I realize Tk is progressing and making some much-wanted improvements,
> but to me it seems like too little, too late.

I certainly get that feeling but I'm not a Tk man myself.

> As for Jon's idea, sure, great! But I wonder if any major publisher
> would take it on. After all, O'Reilly *has* an introductory OCaml book;
> it would need to be updated and translated, but that's still much easier
> than creating a new one. Yet they don't seem interested in doing that.
> So some brave soul might have to self-publish something.

Actually, I was reading a blog entry recently where someone from O'Reilly 
explicitly stated that they are interested in publishing more books on OCaml. 
You could easily strip out any deprecated stuff from their current 
(unpublished) book and publish it. I would certainly buy a copy...

With the current uptake of OCaml in industry (and the productization of F#), I 
think there will be ample market for OCaml teaching material, including 
books.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e

Re: [Caml-list] Re: A labltk book?

[Jon Harrop]

On Monday 15 October 2007 09:01:45 Christoph Bauer wrote:
> > > Tk 8.5 will make extensive use of native widgets.
> >
> > Good idea, I suppose. But what does "native widgets" mean for
> > *nix systems--GTK?
>
> tile adds theme support to Tk. Screenshoots are under
> http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/.

Assuming the vast majority of Unix users will be using either Gnome or KDE, 
that is a non-native look for Unix. In fact, "Classic" looks like RISC OS to 
me, and "Revitalized" looks like old Windows.

I must confess I don't understand the idea of tweaking pixellated widget 
toolkits when everyone else just moved on to hardware-accelerated vector 
graphics with integrated 3D. Especially when the fastest renderer available 
is written in OCaml, free and cross platform... :-)

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e

RE: [Caml-list] Re: A labltk book?

[Christoph Bauer]

> > Tk 8.5 will make extensive use of native widgets.
> 
> Good idea, I suppose. But what does "native widgets" mean for 
> *nix systems--GTK?

tile adds theme support to Tk. Screenshoots are under
http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/.
Under Windows the drawing is done via an X emulation layer.

Christoph Bauer

Re: [Caml-list] Re: A labltk book?

[Matt Gushee]

Jeff Shaw wrote:
> Tk 8.5 will make extensive use of native widgets.

Good idea, I suppose. But what does "native widgets" mean for *nix 
systems--GTK?

-- 
Matt Gushee
: Bantam - lightweight file manager : matt.gushee.net/software/bantam/ :
: RASCL's A Simple Configuration Language :     matt.gushee.net/rascl/ :