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 <a big long list of
things>. 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
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