[Ocaml-biz] creating a household name

[Brian Hurt]

On Sat, 11 Sep 2004, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> Brian Hurt wrote:
> >
> > One thing BLAS/LAPACK don't do is handle sparse matricies.  They were
> > originally designed for vector machines, and work on dense matricies
> > (including banded, triangular, etc.).  But sparse matricies
> > are becomming
> > more and more important.  And when you scratch the surface of sparse
> > matrix handling, you discover that the best implementations
> > are complex
> > data structures- one of the places Ocaml really shines.
> 
> Ok, I have a 10,000 miles up question here.  Of any possible market or
> showcase project, what's going to make OCaml a household name?  I mean,
> the household doesn't have to be Joe and Jane Average, as they don't
> even know what C++ is.  But in households of techno-geeks, what's going
> to make people say "ah, yes, OCaml!"

And any project less than that isn't worth spending time on?

> 
> I don't think sparse matrices are gonna even make a dent. An OpenGL 3D
> engine, or an OCaml-ization of Nebula2, *that* would turn heads.  It's
> just a lot of work.

A) I think you underestimate how much work what I'm talking about is going 
to be.  The reason it doesn't *already* exist in the C++/Java/Python world 
is the amount of work it'd require.  The only reason I think it's doable 
at all is that in Ocaml it'll be 1/10th as much work.

B) A 3D engine would be usefull to you.  Not to me, not to most people.  
It's important for people writting FPS games, but to almost no one else.  
I would argue that a killer linear algebra library- one with performance 
comparable to C++ but with the power of Matlab- would be more widely 
usefull than a 3D game engine.  Both, however, pale in comparison to an 
Ocaml version of J2EE.

I can't contribute to the O2EE project- I know next to nothing about that 
market, what the real requirements and possibilities are.  Of the game 
engine and the numerical library, I think the numerical library is more 
usefull, and definately more interesting to me.

C) It's not applications that make or break a language, it's enabling 
technologies.  Java really took off after J2EE.  C++ had the MFC and the 
STL.  Python had Zope.  Enabling technologies all, that allowed a thousand 
applications bloom.

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Brian