Re: [Caml-list] Re: LLC book [was: Questions]

Re: [Caml-list] Re: LLC book [was: Questions]

[Ed Keith]

--- On Thu, 4/2/09, Alp Mestan <alp@mestan.fr> wrote:

> I think it would be a better effort to start a new work, even if harder.
> OCaml's has known some evolutions, there are many key projects (Extlib, > Core, Batteries, ...) so it would be nice to throw most of today's OCaml > in an entirely new book. Moreover, there wouldn't be any problem with 
> the publisher of LLC.
> 
> 
> But for such a project there would be the need for a great team of very > motivated people.

First let me say that while I have been a professional programmer for over twenty years, have used many languages, and have have been playing with ocaml for several years, I am no expert on ocaml (the only language I claim to be expert in is C++). Nor do I have much experience writing, and, like many Americans, I am monolingual.

Having said that, I currently have some free time time and would be willing to offer my assistance to this project. It would give me the opportunity to hone my writing and ocaml skills, and I believe as an experienced professional programmer (I have worked in government, military, finance, medicine, aviation, and research) and ocaml newbie I could bring a useful perspective to the project. 

I hope I can be of service,

    -EdK

Ed Keith
e_d_k@yahoo.com

Blog: edkeith.blogspot.com




      

Re: [Caml-list] Re: LLC book [was: Questions]

[Jon Harrop]

On Thursday 02 April 2009 13:41:01 Ed Keith wrote:
> Having said that, I currently have some free time time and would be willing
> to offer my assistance to this project. It would give me the opportunity to
> hone my writing and ocaml skills, and I believe as an experienced
> professional programmer (I have worked in government, military, finance,
> medicine, aviation, and research) and ocaml newbie I could bring a useful
> perspective to the project.
>
> I hope I can be of service,

I think the existing books cover the core parts of the language well so there 
is no need for further work in that area but I would like to see books 
covering the following topics:

. Batteries (!).

. Libraries, e.g. LablGTK.

. Post 3.10 camlp4.

. Other tools, e.g. menhir, dpygen, bitstrings, micmatch.

There are also some areas where I think today's OCaml software could be 
improved:

. Automatic FFI stub JIT compilation using LLVM.

. OpenGL 3 bindings.

. GUI libraries.

. IDEs (probably depends upon GUI libraries).

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

Re: [Caml-list] Re: LLC book [was: Questions]

[Alp Mestan]

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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 ?

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 3:37 PM, Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:

> On Thursday 02 April 2009 13:41:01 Ed Keith wrote:
> > Having said that, I currently have some free time time and would be
> willing
> > to offer my assistance to this project. It would give me the opportunity
> to
> > hone my writing and ocaml skills, and I believe as an experienced
> > professional programmer (I have worked in government, military, finance,
> > medicine, aviation, and research) and ocaml newbie I could bring a useful
> > perspective to the project.
> >
> > I hope I can be of service,
>
> I think the existing books cover the core parts of the language well so
> there
> is no need for further work in that area but I would like to see books
> covering the following topics:
>
> . Batteries (!).
>
> . Libraries, e.g. LablGTK.
>
> . Post 3.10 camlp4.
>
> . Other tools, e.g. menhir, dpygen, bitstrings, micmatch.
>
> There are also some areas where I think today's OCaml software could be
> improved:
>
> . Automatic FFI stub JIT compilation using LLVM.
>
> . OpenGL 3 bindings.
>
> . GUI libraries.
>
> . IDEs (probably depends upon GUI libraries).
>
> --
> Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
> http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e
>
> _______________________________________________
> Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management:
> http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list
> Archives: http://caml.inria.fr
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>



-- 
Alp Mestan
In charge of the C++ section on Developpez.com.

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Re: [Caml-list] LLC book [was: Questions]

[Damien Guichard]

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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.

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Re: [Caml-list] Re: LLC book [was: Questions]

[Richard Jones]

On Thu, Apr 02, 2009 at 02:37:28PM +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:
> . Post 3.10 camlp4.

This one is really crying out for a book or some sort of good
reference ...

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat

Re: [Caml-list] Re: LLC book [was: Questions]

[Richard Jones]

On Thu, Apr 02, 2009 at 03:40:33PM +0200, Alp Mestan wrote:
> 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 ?

Once you get into the realm of having lots of authors writing an
"OCaml Bible" there's going to be so little money in it that either
none of them get paid, or the book will cost a huge amount of money
(or both).  Scientific works through traditional publishers are a bit
like that, if my father's experience editing a journal is anything to
go by.

So you might want to think about an alternate method of authorship,
such as a version-controlled, shared document, that allows
contributions and comes under a Free license of some sort.

If people still want an actual book, at the end of the day they can
take the electronic document to lulu.com and get it printed.

BTW, a lot of the content on ocaml-tutorial.org is public domain, if
that proves useful (check with the individual authors though).

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat

Re: [Caml-list] Re: LLC book [was: Questions]

[Joel Reymont]

On Apr 2, 2009, at 7:08 PM, Richard Jones wrote:

> So you might want to think about an alternate method of authorship,
> such as a version-controlled, shared document, that allows
> contributions and comes under a Free license of some sort.

Like the Django Book!

http://www.djangobook.com/

---
Mac hacker with a performance bent
http://linkedin.com/in/joelreymont

Re: [Caml-list] Re: LLC book [was: Questions]

[Zorg 421]

Great idea, would be a pleasure to contribute something to the caml community.

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 8:21 PM, Joel Reymont <joelr1@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Apr 2, 2009, at 7:08 PM, Richard Jones wrote:
>
>> So you might want to think about an alternate method of authorship,
>> such as a version-controlled, shared document, that allows
>> contributions and comes under a Free license of some sort.
>
> Like the Django Book!
>
> http://www.djangobook.com/

Re: [Caml-list] Re: LLC book [was: Questions]

[Richard Jones]

It doesn't take a huge amount to set this up (encouraging people to
write the words is quite another matter).

Source control: http://git.ocamlcore.org/ - check

Decide on a format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook - check

License: http://creativecommons.org/ CC-BY-SA - check

Mailing list for editorial review of submissions:
  http://ocamlcore.org/ - check

Outline and subject areas:
 - Introduction to the language
 - Language core
 - Libraries
 - Camlp4
 - ...

Decide who will be in charge of each area ...

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat

Re: [Caml-list] Re: LLC book [was: Questions]

[Alp Mestan]

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On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 8:39 PM, Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org> wrote:

>
> It doesn't take a huge amount to set this up (encouraging people to
> write the words is quite another matter).
>
> Source control: http://git.ocamlcore.org/ - check
>
> Decide on a format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook - check
>
> License: http://creativecommons.org/ CC-BY-SA - check
>
> Mailing list for editorial review of submissions:
>  http://ocamlcore.org/ - check
>
> Outline and subject areas:
>  - Introduction to the language
>  - Language core
>  - Libraries
>  - Camlp4
>  - ...
>
> Decide who will be in charge of each area ...
>

And even more important, who would like to participate to this project ? ;-)

-- 
Alp Mestan

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Re: [Caml-list] Re: LLC book [was: Questions]

[David Teller]

You could start with this: http://fr.wikibooks.org/wiki/Objective_Caml .
I have only had the time to write about 3 chapters (in French) but it
could serve as a base. Oh, and the license and source control are mostly
solved by the use of Wikibooks.

Cheers,
 David

Re: [Caml-list] Re: LLC book [was: Questions]

[Daniel de Kok]

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 8:39 PM, Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org> wrote:
> Decide on a format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook - check

I have written one open source book, and participated in another, and
DocBook was always a barrier of entrance for most potential
contributors. These days I'd rather go for something like the asciidoc
format, which can also be converted to DocBook. Having DocBook as an
intermediate format is very handy, because it is so easy to customize
XHTML and XSL-FO output with XSLT.

Take care,
Daniel

Re: [Caml-list] Re: LLC book [was: Questions]

[Daniel de Kok]

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 8:39 PM, Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org> wrote:
> Decide on a format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook - check

I have written one open source book, and participated in another, and
DocBook was always a barrier of entrance for most potential
contributors. These days I'd rather go for something like the asciidoc
format, which can also be converted to DocBook. Having DocBook as an
intermediate format is very handy, because it is so easy to customize
XHTML and XSL-FO output with XSLT.

Take care,
Daniel