Re: [Caml-list] questions

[Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr>]

> There must be some reason why the manual and other materials on the
> official site are of such poor quality. I've thought a bit about it, and
> the only reason I see is that the authors do not have a feel for what it
> takes to learn/understand/use that language. They obviously know it all
> through, but that's still far removed from being able to explain it to
> someone else. I don't know, of course, how it is that one understands
> something "well" yet is not able to explain it to somebody else. To me,
> that's very fragile knowledge.

Because we are autistic morons who lack your rock-solid knowledge, if
I properly catch your (rather insulting) drift?

At the very least, you're confusing "to be able" with "to intend to".
The "tutorial" part of the OCaml reference manual was a quick job
targeted at readers who already know functional programming and just
want a quick overview of what's standard and what's different in
OCaml.  Maybe that shouldn't be titled "tutorial" at all.

Teaching functional programming in OCaml to beginners is a rather
different job, for which they are plenty of good books already.  Most
of them happen to be in French for various reasons: O'Reilly's refusal
to publish the English translation of the Chailloux-Manoury-Pagano
book; the Hickey-Rentsch controversy, etc.  But, yes, some talented
teachers invested huge amounts of time in writing good intro to Caml
programming books.  Don't brush their efforts aside.

One last word to you, that Xah Lee troll, and anyone else on this
list: if you're not happy with the existing material, write something
better.  Everyone will thank you and you'll get to better appreciate
the difficulty of the task.

- Xavier Leroy