[Ocaml-biz] creating a household name

[Brandon J. Van Every]

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.

An OpenGL 3D engine, or an OCaml-ization of Nebula2, *that* would turn
heads.  It's just a lot of work.  Incidentally, I've found out that the
Nebula2 core code merely compiles on Linux, and they have no OpenGL
server yet.  So Nebula2 is a Windows-centric project for now.

Super-tutorials in Eclipse would certainly convert people.  In fact,
that's the working title I'd give to such a project: the SuperTutorial.

If there's some very famous / important / high performance C++ project
out there, and we improve SWIG support tremendously, and wrap the C++
project, and demonstrate how much ass OCaml is kicking, and how easy it
is to generate the wrapper, that would turn heads.  I don't know if SWIG
is up to snuff for this though.  The C++ to OCaml bridging problem is
hard.  Anyways, what very famous C++ project might one choose?

Generally speaking, what projects present **HUGE** possibilities of
success?  Even if they are a lot of work?


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

Taking risk where others will not.