[Caml-list] popular for being popular

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@indiegamedesign.com>]

Brian Hurt wrote:
>
> Oh, and by the way, in the opinion of every C++ advocate I
> know, you're
> not programming in C++ unless you're using both templates and
> the STL.  C with classes, after all, is just too much like C.

I did tons of complicated multiple inheritance templates with virtual
base classes back in 1993, to the limit of what the language was capable
of at the time.  I made no money from it and concluded that I had
completely wasted my time.  Years later, this has affected my
willingness to swallow STL.  The accident of history is I never learned
STL, because back in the day it wasn't so standard.

> > - the support of basic 3D graphics types, i.e. 32 bit floats
>
> Hmm.  Silly me, I thought the basic 3D graphics types were vectors,
> matricies, and quaternions.

You don't do any DirectX programming do you?  Nor shader programs
either, I imagine.  32 bits is "the really accurate stuff."  The high
resolution rendering frontier is 128-bit color.  It's not and ain't
gonna be 256-bit color for the next 10 years at least.

> 2) Not Invented Here.  Specifically, Not Invented in Industry.  Eww-
> research cooties!  The implicit assumption of your average
> programmer is
> that people in academia never do "real" work, and wouldn't know it or
> understand it if it bit them on the ass.  Never mind that writting and
> maintaining a cross-platform optimizing compiler qualifies as
> real work,
> they're certain that no one in academia would ever do
> something like that.
> At most, they think, an academic would just write a proof of concept,
> allowing them to handwave past minor problems, and then
> promptly abandon
> the code and return to writting proofs and journal papers.

Forget theory, where's proof?  There's no OCaml 3D graphics engine out
there.  I'm on the frontier.  There's nothing proving OCaml's any good
at 3D graphics at all.  I just have some faith in it because of its
performance capabilities in other areas.

OCaml is proven at language transformation problems.  Nobody in industry
cares about this.

Academics *don't* do real work.  They do research problems, and real
(i.e. boring) work is regarded as uninteresting.  (And rightly so.)  It
isn't pursued to the degree necessary for industrial support.  Frankly
you gotta just pay people to do that kind of gruntwork, it's not fun.
Ideally one would look to have an academic-industrial partnership.  I
believe we've been over this ground before, on the subject of core
language capabilities vs. standard libraries.  I hope someone has the
energy to move forwards on that... I don't.  I'm worried about 3D
graphics engines, not (boring) industrial support.

There's the impulse to do research, and then there's the impulse to
achieve widespread industrial relevance.  They are not the same impulse.

> 3) Marketing.

So where's the Marketing?  If you've got zero marketing, then nobody
cares about you.  I've been through it with the Python crowd about
marketing.  They're way farther along the evolutionary succession of
marketing than you guys are, and they still totally suck.  Hopefully you
don't have anything remotely resembling Guido's foibles though.  If he
would just refrain from exercising his prejudicial aesthetic judgement
on language logos and just get the hell outta the way of people who
actually have talent for the enterprise... but it didn't happen, and it
won't happen.  Nobody's going to try again with those PSF Dilberts for a
few years yet.

I don't think open source techies are even vaguely capable of marketing.
In this arena I'm utterly contemptuous of them.  Aside from personal
experience, I see abundant evidence in Myers-Briggs Type Indicators as
to why they're this way.  A technology simply has to advance,
technologically, among techies, until it's finally worth enough money to
suits that they step in and take over.


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

"The pioneer is the one with the arrows in his back."
                          - anonymous entrepreneur

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