On 4 Sep 2009, at 15:38, Hezekiah M. Carty wrote: >> >> If you provide the live CD as both a physical CD and a downloadable >> ISO, they can even run it virtualized so they don't need to reboot. > > This may be a nice longer-term goal for Batteries and/or Community > OCaml. Providing a livecd or perhaps a ready-to-go virtual machine > image would make it much simpler for folks with problems (4) and (6) > to try out both OCaml and Batteries in a known-functional environment. I don't think this is a realistic use case. I am interested in using OCaml for real work; the way I "try" any language (or tool, or library, etc) is to install it on my work machine and use it to tackle a small but real problem. If I like what I see I take it further, then eventually I will want to deploy it. A sandbox is nothing more than a toy for freshmen (and freshmen who need spoonfeeding, at that). I am after a language that has the rapid-development of Python or Tcl but with type safety; OCaml is right now the best bet, but it is *very* rough around the edges. The way you install ActivePython is you download it and run the installer and a few minutes later you're ready to go with everything you need. I'm just reading the release notes for Batteries now and it starts, you will need . Maybe I'm just spoilt by other language distributions, but I think I am representative of the "OCaml-curious" programmer, and that's not what "batteries included" implies to us. I don't mean to single Batteries out here, it's definitely a step in the right direction, and kudos to those that have put in the effort. It's a general problem in the OCaml world. Compare Python's actively developed cx_Oracle to OCaml's abandoned Oracaml. Or Python's excellent Matplotlib to OCaml's frankly crude Plplot, I tried to draw a graph with a legend today, very simple you might think, wait, Plplot doesn't even do that! It would be a very hard sell to my colleagues right now, regardless of the brilliance of type inference, pattern matching, etc... Cheers, G