It's far more than
just about human ressources.
What you describe is some sort of
"OCaml Bible".
First you have to decide what book you
want.
If you do an OCaml Bible then probably some
beginners will lack an introductory text.
If you do an introductory text then
probably more experienced people will lack a reference
book.
As i remember it Le Langage
Caml was largely about compilation techniques.
That's yet another choice:
* do you want to introduce OCaml where it shines
best, as an rewriting tool ?
* or do you want to be more general
and application-agnostic ?
Certainly at some point you have to speak
about semantic, so :
* do you want to be practical and omit the boring
theory ?
* or do you want to speak about lambda-calculus,
type inference and value restriction ?
Do you want a full exposure of the
module language ?
Or just the bits that allow usage of the
standard modules ?
Do you want to present advanced usage of
polymorphic variants ?
Or do you want to just point the
right articles and let the reader perfect its knowledge ?
Certainly you also want to discuss different
programming styles.
Moreover it's much better, especially for library
designers, if you introduce some functional niceties
(maps, folds, continuations, lazyness,
monads...).
That's many conflicting
questions.
The reason why you overlook them is
because you greatly overestimate the importance of libraries.
Even from the library point of
view, it's better if the langage comes first, it encourages a much more
elaborated design.
-- damien
Damien
Guichard
2009-04-02
En réponse au message
de
: Alp Mestan
du :
2009-04-02 15:40:45
À : Jon Harrop;
caml-list@yquem.inria.fr
CC :
Sujet : Re: [Caml-list]
Re: LLC book [was: Questions]
Indeed, as I said above, a book on "today's
OCaml" should cover a wide variety of topics (syntax extensions with camlp4/5,
general purpose libraries, specific libraries like ocamlnet, GTK+ and OpenGL
binding, etc). To write such a book, there would be the need for many authors
with time and knowledge to produce a good learning and practice material for
OCaml !
I think many of us would enjoy writing some paragraphs for such a
project... But would there be enough people to achieve the writing of an entire
(and good) book ?
--
Alp Mestan
In charge of the C++ section on
Developpez.com.