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| Jon Harrop 2007-05-29, 8:04 am |
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What is Scala like from the point of view of an SML, OCaml or Haskell user?
Any particular good/bad points?
Given how popular OCaml and Haskell are these days, I'd have expected to see
more people using languages like Scala but it seems to be very unpopular.
I'm just wondering if I missed something or if people just haven't thought
about it yet.
Might be time for a Scala for Scientists book. ;-)
--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
The F#.NET Journal
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/produc...journal/?usenet
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| Dirk Thierbach 2007-05-29, 7:06 pm |
| Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
> Given how popular OCaml and Haskell are these days, I'd have expected to see
> more people using languages like Scala but it seems to be very unpopular.
My personal reason I haven't used Scala is that I'd have to install
all the Java stuff, which at the moment I am not interested in.
Haskell and OCaml are installed and working fine, so why switch?
As for popularity, that's really hard to judge. I guess there are still
enough people who would describe both Haskell and OCaml as "unpopular".
> I'm just wondering if I missed something or if people just haven't
> thought about it yet.
If I am ever in a situation where I have to use Java, Scala will be the
first thing I try. The CAL language that has been mentioned in the
other thread, and which I hadn't heard about before, also looks interesting.
Quite Haskelly :-)
- Dirk
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| Jon Harrop 2007-05-29, 10:03 pm |
| Dirk Thierbach wrote:
> Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
>
> My personal reason I haven't used Scala is that I'd have to install
> all the Java stuff, which at the moment I am not interested in.
This is really one of the things that interests me about it. I'm looking for
a statically-typed functional language that integrates into the JVM so that
you can write GUI applications and applets with ease. However, I've yet to
find such a language.
> Haskell and OCaml are installed and working fine, so why switch?
I'm interested in diversifying, not switching. I should look at Haskell
though.
> As for popularity, that's really hard to judge. I guess there are still
> enough people who would describe both Haskell and OCaml as "unpopular".
Sure. I'm really interested in knowing the size of our target market, of
course. Thanks to its high-performance, many scientists and engineers use
OCaml and these guys buy products. I'd like to know if the same is true of
related languages like Haskell and Scala but it is very difficult to
assess.
>
> If I am ever in a situation where I have to use Java, Scala will be the
> first thing I try. The CAL language that has been mentioned in the
> other thread, and which I hadn't heard about before, also looks
> interesting. Quite Haskelly :-)
Yes, there are certainly lots of interesting languages out there. However,
the vast majority have not reached critical mass in terms of the size of
the user base.
--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
The F#.NET Journal
fohttp://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/fsharp_journal/?usenet
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| Phil Armstrong 2007-05-30, 8:04 am |
| Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
> Dirk Thierbach wrote:
>
> Sure. I'm really interested in knowing the size of our target market, of
> course. Thanks to its high-performance, many scientists and engineers use
> OCaml and these guys buy products. I'd like to know if the same is true of
> related languages like Haskell and Scala but it is very difficult to
> assess.
O'Reilly appears to be taking a punt on a Haskell book, so presumably
they think Haskell has reached the necessary critical mass within
their market to make it worth publishing something.
Phil
--
http://www.kantaka.co.uk/ .oOo. public key: http://www.kantaka.co.uk/gpg.txt
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| Jon Harrop 2007-05-30, 8:04 am |
| Phil Armstrong wrote:
> O'Reilly appears to be taking a punt on a Haskell book, so presumably
> they think Haskell has reached the necessary critical mass within
> their market to make it worth publishing something.
Very interesting. I'm just reading Paul Hudak's "The Haskell School of
Expression", which is excellent.
Incidentally, did you see my take on Tim O'Reilly's analysis of book sales?
I didn't realise we could compete with mainstream publishers... :-)
--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
OCaml for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/produc...entists/?usenet
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| Phil Armstrong 2007-05-30, 8:04 am |
| Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
> Phil Armstrong wrote:
>
> Very interesting. I'm just reading Paul Hudak's "The Haskell School of
> Expression", which is excellent.
That's the multimedia based one?
> Incidentally, did you see my take on Tim O'Reilly's analysis of book sales?
> I didn't realise we could compete with mainstream publishers... :-)
Don't think so. I only vaguely remember the Tim O'R piece -- the bit
that sticks in the mind is that their Lisp books had appalling sales
(except for the emacs one)..
Phil
--
http://www.kantaka.co.uk/ .oOo. public key: http://www.kantaka.co.uk/gpg.txt
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| Mark T.B. Carroll 2007-05-30, 8:04 am |
| Phil Armstrong <phil-news@kantaka.co.uk> writes:
> Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
(snip)
>
> That's the multimedia based one?
Yes, it is.
There's a good number of Haskell books now. Some of them aren't obvious
from the title (e.g., "Algorithms: A Functional Programming Approach"),
but there's been something of a hole in the market for 'intermediate'
texts for working programmers who have got past the basics and are now
faced with most of the useful extra knowledge being scattered among
academic papers - I hope this O'Reilly book will help to fill that hole.
(The Haskell wikibook's started to try, too.) For instance, this morning
for quite a practical problem I now get to look at an ICFP paper in the
hope it tells me what to do.
>
> Don't think so. I only vaguely remember the Tim O'R piece -- the bit
> that sticks in the mind is that their Lisp books had appalling sales
> (except for the emacs one)..
That's interesting. I've found the Lisp and ML communities hard to
judge. OCaml certainly has a non-trivial active user base, and Haskell
seems to have caught a good wave; I guess we'll see.
-- Mark
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| Jon Harrop 2007-05-30, 10:06 pm |
| Mark T.B. Carroll wrote:
> Phil Armstrong <phil-news@kantaka.co.uk> writes:
>
> That's interesting. I've found the Lisp and ML communities hard to
> judge. OCaml certainly has a non-trivial active user base, and Haskell
> seems to have caught a good wave; I guess we'll see.
So I posted my analysis of his statistics here:
http://ocamlnews.blogspot.com/2007/...revolution.html
Several interesting points:
1. OCaml for Scientists is outselling APress's Practical OCaml.
2. Tim only counted units sold and not profit (we sell at £85 each).
3. OCaml desperately needs a cheap introductory book.
So I think there is plenty of scope for upmarket books targetting
professionals, like we target scientists and engineers. The financial
sector have next to nothing and the pharmaceutical industry have next to
nothing. Moreover, mainstream publishers do not know how to sell books on
non-mainstream languages, so you might as well self-publish as we do.
We are very happy with the statistics, even though Tim put OCaml under
his "Irrelevant Programming Languages" section.
--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
OCaml for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/produc...entists/?usenet
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| Bruce Stephens 2007-05-30, 10:06 pm |
| Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> writes:
[...]
> 1. OCaml for Scientists is outselling APress's Practical OCaml.
I don't think that tells us much: Practical OCaml got pretty bad
reviews, at least on blogs, etc. I guess for some subjects that
wouldn't matter, but for this one I'd guess most of the potential
market was (like me) turned off by the obviously poor reception it was
getting before we got close to ordering.
> 2. Tim only counted units sold and not profit (we sell at £85 each).
There is that, sure. There are well-known tradeoffs between price and
volume, and I've no doubt there's profit to be made with expensive
books of good quality. (Tufte springs to mind, though his books tend
to be £25-£35, but maybe that works out similar per page.)
> 3. OCaml desperately needs a cheap introductory book.
If someone wrote a good quality introductory book which could be
cheaply published, I'd be surprised if all of O'Reilly, APress,
Pragmatic, etc., turned it down. I'm sure there's a market for such a
thing, as you suggest.
[...]
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| Rainer Joswig 2007-05-30, 10:06 pm |
| In article <0p60j4-mie.ln1@kantaka.co.uk>,
Phil Armstrong <phil-news@kantaka.co.uk> wrote:
> Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
>
> That's the multimedia based one?
>
>
> Don't think so. I only vaguely remember the Tim O'R piece -- the bit
> that sticks in the mind is that their Lisp books had appalling sales
> (except for the emacs one)..
O'Reilly had Lisp books? Where did you get that idea?
AFAIK, there has not one Lisp book being published by
O'Reilly, besides "Writing GNU Emacs Extensions".
They discourage authors to propose Lisp books to them
on their website. The current wording is a bit less
unfriendly than it used to be. Probably a Lisp book
would also take more work than their business allows?
One of the current Lisp books is 'Practical Common Lisp'
by Peter Seibel. It has been published online (as PDF) and
printed by Apress: http://www.apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=237
Two printings at together 8000 copies and now the
third printing. I guess even such an useful book
is not sold in numbers interesting for 'O'Reilly'.
>
> Phil
--
http://lispm.dyndns.org
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| Phil Armstrong 2007-05-31, 8:04 am |
| Rainer Joswig <joswig@lisp.de> wrote:
> In article <0p60j4-mie.ln1@kantaka.co.uk>,
> Phil Armstrong <phil-news@kantaka.co.uk> wrote:
>
> O'Reilly had Lisp books? Where did you get that idea?
> AFAIK, there has not one Lisp book being published by
> O'Reilly, besides "Writing GNU Emacs Extensions".
>
> They discourage authors to propose Lisp books to them
> on their website. The current wording is a bit less
> unfriendly than it used to be. Probably a Lisp book
> would also take more work than their business allows?
I had the impression from the article that the *reason* for the
unfriendliness of that wording was because they'd been burnt in the
past. But I can't find the article now & I could certainly be
misremembering (it was on the topic of how O'Reilly chooses what books
to publish).
Phil
--
http://www.kantaka.co.uk/ .oOo. public key: http://www.kantaka.co.uk/gpg.txt
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| Marcos Nunes 2007-05-31, 8:04 am |
| On 2007-05-31, Phil Armstrong <phil-news@kantaka.co.uk> wrote:
> I had the impression from the article that the *reason* for the
> unfriendliness of that wording was because they'd been burnt in the
> past. But I can't find the article now & I could certainly be
> misremembering (it was on the topic of how O'Reilly chooses what books
> to publish).
Here:
http://www.oreilly.com/oreilly/auth...forus_1101.html
"We're NOT looking for:
...
* Books on topics that have dismal sales despite quality books being
available. (If you're addressing a topic where good books have sold
dismally in the past (for instance, LISP, LaTeX, or Web-based
training), you have a much higher threshold to clear with your
proposal. Convince us why there is a revival of interest in your
topic, or why your approach to a deadly topic will provoke interest
nonetheless.)"
Interestingly, they're preparing a Haskell book:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2...world_hask.html
-- mnunes
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| Markus E Leypold 2007-05-31, 8:04 am |
|
> Mark T.B. Carroll wrote:
>
> So I posted my analysis of his statistics here:
>
> http://ocamlnews.blogspot.com/2007/...revolution.html
>
> Several interesting points:
>
> 1. OCaml for Scientists is outselling APress's Practical OCaml.
Probably only due to aggressive marketing.
SNCR -- Markus
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| Rainer Joswig 2007-05-31, 8:04 am |
| In article <l0h2j4-lk6.ln1@kantaka.co.uk>,
Phil Armstrong <phil-news@kantaka.co.uk> wrote:
> Rainer Joswig <joswig@lisp.de> wrote:
>
> I had the impression from the article that the *reason* for the
> unfriendliness of that wording was because they'd been burnt in the
> past.
They talk about book sales in the past. But not necessarily
'their' book sales in the past. They do market research before
they publish a book.
As I said, besides the book about programming for GNU Emacs,
there has not been a book about Lisp by them. I could be
wrong, but I simply don't know one. Amazon or Google doesn't find any
- new or old.
But there are other publishers out there.
> But I can't find the article now & I could certainly be
> misremembering (it was on the topic of how O'Reilly chooses what books
> to publish).
>
> Phil
--
http://lispm.dyndns.org
| |
| Rainer Joswig 2007-05-31, 8:04 am |
| In article <slrnf5tbca.2r6.marcos.nunes76@localhost.localdomain>,
Marcos Nunes <marcos.nunes76@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2007-05-31, Phil Armstrong <phil-news@kantaka.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Here:
> http://www.oreilly.com/oreilly/auth...forus_1101.html
>
> "We're NOT looking for:
> ...
> * Books on topics that have dismal sales despite quality books being
> available. (If you're addressing a topic where good books have sold
> dismally in the past (for instance, LISP, LaTeX, or Web-based
> training), you have a much higher threshold to clear with your
> proposal. Convince us why there is a revival of interest in your
> topic, or why your approach to a deadly topic will provoke interest
> nonetheless.)"
>
> Interestingly, they're preparing a Haskell book:
> http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2...world_hask.html
>
> -- mnunes
Which used to be:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030421...forus_1101.html
We're NOT looking for:
* Books that overlap too heavily with our existing books.
* Books on proprietary technologies that don't have a huge user base.
* Clever new marketing spins on an old topic.
* certification books, in most cases.
* Books on miniscule (i.e., personal or nascent) products, even if they are open source.
* Any books on LISP, LaTeX, or Web-based training.
* Books on topics that have dismal sales despite quality books being available.
* Books for managers and executives. Managers and executive don't buy our books;
developers do. (We do, however, publish some books that will be of interest to both
developers and managers.)
* Books that have been rejected by other publishers, in most cases.
--
http://lispm.dyndns.org
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| Phil Armstrong 2007-05-31, 7:07 pm |
| Rainer Joswig <joswig@lisp.de> wrote:
> They talk about book sales in the past. But not necessarily
> 'their' book sales in the past. They do market research before
> they publish a book.
That would explain my confusion then.
Phil
--
http://www.kantaka.co.uk/ .oOo. public key: http://www.kantaka.co.uk/gpg.txt
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