[Ocaml-biz] creating a household name

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Brian Hurt wrote:
> >
> > 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?

It depends on what you mean by "less."  I definitely see a minimum
necessary impact upon programmerdom.  The impact must be substantial.
It must also have some inherent marketability, it should fire the geek
imagination.  It should be in a problem domain familiar to a lot of
geeks.  It should make anyone familiar with the problem domain REALLY
REALLY EXCITED that some great technology is being offered.  It should
be a slam dunk.  The problem should be recognizeable as something that
really really really needs to be solved, and is really really really
useful / kewl if it is solved.

> > I don't think sparse matrices are gonna even make a dent.

And I say again, I don't think this problem has that kind of street
cred.

> B) A 3D engine would be usefull to you.  Not to me, not to
> most people.

Au contraire!  There's the entire game industry, all the hobbyists, all
the students, and all the people who simply play the resulting games.  A
kickass 3D engine would have the street cred, of that I am sure.

> It's important for people writting FPS games, but to almost
> no one else.

No, 3D engines are important to most game genres nowadays.  If you don't
use a 3D engine, you are foregoing the high end of production values and
special effects.  This is true for 2D as well: the Windows world moved
to a "do your 2D as a special case of 3D" model of programming several
years ago.  You can of course do games in plain old GDI or Flash, or
cellphone games or whatever.  That's fine for a certain size of game,
but there's a lot of stuff you can't do in those media.

> 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.

I wouldn't.  I think you are fantasizing unduly about people giving up
their BLAS/LAPACK.  That's worse than asking people to give up their Vim
for Visual Studio.  *WAY* worse.  Whereas in games, a commercial quality
open source 3D engine hasn't been achieved yet.  Even Nebula2 isn't
quite ready to go.  People are working on titles with it, they haven't
shipped 'em yet.

> Both, however, pale in comparison to an
> Ocaml version of J2EE.

I agree that the enterprise space is a much much bigger market, but I
think you're underestimating the size of the game industry, and the
amount of attention it gets from people because it's inherently a
consumer marketing industry.  J2EE isn't readily apparent to everyone at
BestBuy.

> Of the game
> engine and the numerical library, I think the numerical
> library is more usefull, and definately more interesting to me.

Well, none of us are ever going to cooperate on projects that are
buckets and buckets of work.  We are all smart enough and experienced
enough that we're not going to commit ourselves unless something is 100%
in synch with our personal goals.  The programming resources available
to ocaml-biz are modest.  We've all got 'bigger fish to fry' elsewhere.
Mine is clearly the OCaml 3D engine.

> 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.

Ok, what is OCaml sorely missing in this regard?  What are the closest
things it has to these various enablers?

I think beefing up SWIG would be a huge enabler.  Then all the C++
programmers could move on to OCaml.  People could try out OCaml without
a significant resource committment, as they could glom it onto existing
code.


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

Taking risk where others will not.