[ocaml-biz] Book

[William D. Neumann]

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004, Martin Jambon wrote:

>>  as well as rewriting sections that delve a
>> bit too deeply into the academic side of things.
>
> But unfortunately normal people are not prepared for an "OCaml Cookbook".
> They have to learn a few things first (I call this academic).

Well, by academic, I'm referring to things like bringing in concepts of 
functional programming that don't need to be brought up (or at least named 
at an early point) to learn how to program in OCaml -- things like lambda 
calculus, referential transparency, operational semantics, etc.  Look at 
Cousineau & Mauny and then look at Hickey's work -- see a striking 
difference?  A person who already knows how to program in something like C 
or Java can breeze right through the Hickey's book and learn a great deal 
about basic programming in OCaml, possibly stopping for a bit to digest 
the section on red/black trees.

However, while I don't have the C & M book here with me to look at, I know 
that even someone like me, who has been coding in OCaml for a couple 
of years needs to stop and re-read sections of it that are just too dense 
to get through easily (not to mention that some of the sections are a 
wonderful treatment for insomnia...)

What I (and I believe Brian) think is needed is a book that helps people 
migrate from other, better known, languages to OCaml.  A book like 
"Learning Perl", or Paul Wang's "C++ With Object-Oriented Programming". 
This is opposed to a "This is how to program" type book, or even worse, a 
"Structure And Interpretation of Computer Programs" book using OCaml as 
the main language.  That can come along *after* a migratory book.

William D. Neumann

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