From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id SAA19067; Wed, 9 Jun 2004 18:13:16 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id SAA19219 for ; Wed, 9 Jun 2004 18:13:14 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from herd.plethora.net (herd.plethora.net [205.166.146.1]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.12.10/8.12.10) with ESMTP id i59GD7SH025439 for ; Wed, 9 Jun 2004 18:13:07 +0200 Received: from bhurt.plethora.net (bhurt.plethora.net [205.166.146.49]) by herd.plethora.net (8.11.6/8.10.1) with ESMTP id i59GD2G28519 for ; Wed, 9 Jun 2004 11:13:02 -0500 (CDT) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2004 11:18:52 -0500 (CDT) From: Brian Hurt X-X-Sender: bhurt@localhost.localdomain To: caml Subject: Re: [Caml-list] popular for being popular In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Miltered: at concorde with ID 40C73713.000 by Joe's j-chkmail (http://j-chkmail.ensmp.fr)! X-Loop: caml-list@inria.fr X-Spam: no; 0.00; caml-list:01 brandon:99 abandon:01 ocaml's:01 cop:99 api:01 pursued:99 ideally:01 partnership:99 ocamlopt:01 work-:99 python:01 resembling:01 vaguely:01 python:01 Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk On Wed, 9 Jun 2004, Brandon J. Van Every wrote: > > 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. > I will cop to not having a lot of experience in 3D graphics. On the other hand, I talk to people in a lot of different areas of the computing industry. First off, the vast majority of programmers have no need for floating point numbers at all. Second, I have two nuclear-family members who work in the CAD-CAM industry, and a third who does numeric simulations (for the military, btw). And (this issue having come up before), none of them bother to use single-precision floating point except when an external API (directX) demands it. So while the games industry may be all over single-precision, other users of 3D rendering aren't. > OCaml is proven at language transformation problems. Nobody in industry > cares about this. Yep. There being no money in compilers. > 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. > Obviously my dripping saracasm wasn't dripping enough. Frankly, I consider writting a multi-platform optimizing compiler (like, say, ocamlopt) and maintaining it for a decade or more to be more "real" work than writting some game that'll have a six month shelf life (if you're lucky). And this is *exactly* the attitude I was talking about. "Academics can't do real work- if they could, they'd be doing real work and not research!" > > 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. Perl and python have gained widespread adoption despite not being corporate financed. I go down to my local book store, and what do I see? Shelf after shelf of books on C++, Java, Perl, C#, and VB. If I go hunting for it, I might find a book on lisp or scheme tucked away in a corner- I have yet to go into a bookstore and find a book on Ocaml (I look). I go to the magazine rack, and what do I see? Half a dozen (or more) magazines on C++ and Java programming, 2-3 each on VB and Perl, and an increasing number on C#. This is advertising. -- "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." - Gene Spafford Brian ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners