[Ocaml-biz] creating a household name

[Tony Edgin]

On Sun, 12 Sep 2004 02:05, 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!"
>
> I don't think sparse matrices are gonna even make a dent.

Okay.  I can't resist any longer.  Brandon, you are into AI, right?  Sparse 
matrices are incredibly useful for optimized AI computations, unless your a 
primitive "if-then-else" guy.  Also at the core of any 3D game engine is 
linear algebra library.  Thus Brian's idea of an updated LA package would be 
useful to you.

This maybe moot, but is there anyone on this list that has experience in 
writing 3D game engines?  If there isn't, then it would be extremely hard for 
us to do that.  I might even say impossible.  In that case, I think we'd be 
more likely to succeed writing Brian's tongue and cheek O2EE application.

I'm not suggesting we do Brian's LA package idea, but I'm guessing there are 
at least some Ocaml programmers with domain knowledge in numerical 
mathematics.

cheers.

-- 
Tony Edgin
CARP