I would like to report on a recent experience of a student of mine who is starting to learn Ocaml. His first taks was to get Ocaml installed on his Windows 7. The student previously had no trouble installing Java, Eclipse, erlang, and an erlang plugin for Eclipse.
1. He tried to install with the binary installer for Windows. Norton Antivirus told him the installer has too low a reputation and deleted it. 2. He installed the source, which meant he just unpacked it someplace. 3. He installed one of the Ocaml plugins for Eclipse, I think it was the fpeclipse one. 4. The plugin complained that it can't find Ocaml, even though he told it where he unpacked the source. Then I came in. I realized he just unpacked the source, asked him if he tried the binary installer, and he told me the antivirus story. So we went on: 5. We deleted the source. 6. We installed Mingw. 7. We disabled Norton Antivirus and installed Ocaml with the binary installer. 8. Eclipse stopped working. 9. I diagoned the problem relatively quickly: the Ocaml installer or maybe MinGW destroyed the PATH environment variable. 10. We spent some time restoring PATH to a correct value. 11. We deleted the Eclipse plugins because they didn't work somehow. 12. We installed OcaIDE into Eclipse. 13. OcaIDE told us it won't work without Cygwin. 14. We installed Cygwin, but did not know what packages OcaIDE wanted, so we just installed whatever was turned on by default. 15. I felt stupid for having installed Mingw in step 5, now that we had Cygwin. 16. We followed the video tutorial for OcaIDE to create a HelloWorld project. 17. OcaIDE did not work because there was some error in some XML file. 18. I told the student to check forums, check that OcaIDE works with Eclipse 3.7, and to generally pray to the gods of software. I am waiting for him to come back. Does it really have to be that hard? It's not a stupid student, you know. And he has the right to use Eclipse, so don't tell me he should learn Emacs. Emacs is for old people like you and me. With kind regards, Andrej -- Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management and archives: https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/info/caml-list Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
