[MLton] writing a book?

[Stephen Weeks]

> I know you are all busy with the development of mlton itself, but
> wouldn't it be a good idea to have a book for real-world programmers
> on sml/mlton? I'm not a native writer of English so could only write
> chapters with extensive proofreading from others. I have some ideas,
> e.g. the target audience should be people already know some Cish
> programming language.

I think such a book would be nice, and agree that in order to have
greatest utility the target must be those having no experience with a
functional language.  I have always felt that none of the current SML
books, e.g. those listed on

  http://mlton.org/StandardMLBooks

does justice to the language in terms of SML's benefits in building
real applications.

There was a start on a more applied book, Unix System Programming with
Standard ML,

  http://mlton.org/References#Shipman02

which seems to have disappeared off the web.


My current thinking is that in order to have immediate impact, get the
most help from the community, and make real progress, the MLton wiki
*is* the beginnings of a book like what you are thinking of.  We've
been slowly accumulating pages on programming techniques, aspects of
SML, and more.  See

  http://mlton.org/StandardML

There's room for plenty more, and I encourage anyone who has the urge
to explain something about SML or an SML programming technique to add
something.  For example, Gergely, if you want to add a page targeted
at C programmers, go for it.

  http://mlton.org/StandardMLForCProgrammers

Once you put that up, I have no doubt that it will be proofread by
native English speakers and improvements will begin to accumulate.

Another page I think is sorely needed is

  http://mlton.org/WhyUseStandardML

It would be great to be able to point people who are considering using
MLton/SML at that page.


At some point, a few years down the road, if the time is right,
someone or some group of people can clean up a subset of the wiki and
turn it into a book (that possibility is one reason why contributions
to the wiki are required to be in the public domain).