Matthew schrieb:
> Actually, my next book's going to be on STL, but Walter and I have have
> planned a small book on D which has had the approval from my publisher
> (Addison-Wesley).

Would you accept contributions from outside?

Could you possibly publish the planned list of topics, say, on a Wiki? People can get ideas from it and suggest and/or contribute further topics.

Or should this all be left for another book?

-eye

"Ilya Minkov" <minkov@cs.tum.edu> wrote in message news:cjho7i$18ki$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> Matthew schrieb:
> > Actually, my next book's going to be on STL, but Walter and I have
have
> > planned a small book on D which has had the approval from my
publisher
> > (Addison-Wesley).
>
> Would you accept contributions from outside?

What kind of contributions?

Do you mean something like where a chapter's provided by different authors? I have another idea for a book, later on, for which that'd not only be possible, but actually desirable

> Could you possibly publish the planned list of topics, say, on a Wiki? People can get ideas from it and suggest and/or contribute further
topics.

Good idea. We'll think about doing that.

> Or should this all be left for another book?

The first book will be a small introductory book, so what I _think_ you're planning may not be appropriate. But, as I said, I've an idea for another book which may be suitable for that kind of approach.

Thanks for the stimulating ideas, as usual. :-)

Matthew

>>>Have you seen AJ's 'Int' library. It sounds to me like the same thing as
>>>you are writing.
>>>It is available in Deimos on the DSource site:
>>>   http://www.dsource.org/projects/deimos/
>>
>>I saw it.  The license conditions were a bit unsavory.
>
>But the license lets you do absolutely anything you want with it. It's a straightforward BSD license (with an added sense of humor). What's the problem with it? It was my intention that it should be usable by anyone, commercially or otherwise, without restraint.

The added sense of humor is what threw me off.  Particularly the bit that required me to include that sense of humor.

It's not even good grammar!  :)

I'll be releasing my library under MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-license.  So you can still play with it.

>Unlimited precision decimals would be a very welcome addition to D. I certainly look forward to seeing your class.

And ripping it apart... I'm hoping to have an alpha this weekend.  There will be plenty of work to do on it, including supporting reals.

The unittest will be very intensive, though.  Remember this is a port from my JS BigDecimal script, and when I was writing that, I came up with one big honkin' testcase suite.  Coding that into the unittest will be fun.

Alexander J. Vincent
(no relation to AJ at http://userfriendly.org)
Vallejo, CA

>I'd say that if you're writing a book because someone else wants it, then you're writing it for the wrong reasons. Write for the love of writing. You don't need anyone else's permission, approval, or even support. If you want to write it, just write it.

Believe it or not, I agree with you.  I write all the time, whether it's code, articles, or science fiction.  I just sent off a short story for this year's "Strange New Worlds VIII Contest" (Star Trek), so who knows?

>Well, I've been criticised in the past because my thinking is not very "commercial", but that's my take, for what it's worth.

My take is "Writing is easy.  Getting paid for it... that takes a bit more work."

Alexander J. Vincent
author, JavaScript Developer's Dictionary (Sams Publishing, 2002)

"The first step to confirming there is a bug in someone else's work is confirming there are no bugs in your own." -- AJV, June 2001.

In article <cjhuh6$1rf4$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Matthew says...

>Do you mean something like where a chapter's provided by different authors? I have another idea for a book, later on, for which that'd not only be possible, but actually desirable
>
>> Could you possibly publish the planned list of topics, say, on a Wiki? People can get ideas from it and suggest and/or contribute further
>topics.
>...
>But, as I said, I've an idea for
>another book which may be suitable for that kind of approach.
>
>Thanks for the stimulating ideas, as usual. :-)
>
>Matthew

I hope you'll keep me in mind as well.  I just enjoy writing, and tinkering.

"Arcane Jill" <Arcane_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:cjgk3m$2762$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> I'd say that if you're writing a book because someone else wants it, then
you're
> writing it for the wrong reasons. Write for the love of writing. You don't
need
> anyone else's permission, approval, or even support. If you want to write
it,
> just write it.
>
> Well, I've been criticised in the past because my thinking is not very "commercial", but that's my take, for what it's worth.

I do so enjoy your post. I've been successful commercially with products that I wrote to please myself. Products I've written to satisfy the marketing department's take on what people want have all been failures.

Therefore, I consider the fact that marketing's take on the D project being utter madness as a good omen.

In article <cjhuhi$1rgs$1@digitaldaemon.com>, ajvincent@juno.com says...

>>But the [Int] license lets you do absolutely anything you want with it. It's a straightforward BSD license (with an added sense of humor). What's the problem with it? It was my intention that it should be usable by anyone, commercially or otherwise, without restraint.
>
>The added sense of humor is what threw me off.

Hehehehe

>Particularly the bit that
>required me to include that sense of humor.

But of course. What would be the point otherwise? See - the thing is, I'm utterly contemptuous of the whole "intellectual property" charade. I think it's nonsense. It's an attempt to lump together all sorts of disparate concepts (a copyright is not the same thing as a trademark; a trademark is not the same thing a patent, etc.) under one name, in some kind of mad attempt to treat all these issues the same way, and to perpetuate the idea that ideas can be owned. (Don't you just wish that you or one of your ancestors could have taken out a patent on taking out a patent?). So, as you might guess, I'm a strong advocate of open source. My code can be used by anyone. It can be used in commercial software. It can even be modified and redistributed in modified form. It is a /much/ more liberal license than LGPL or GPL (I don't know much about MPL - I had a brief look at it, and it looked long and complicated and full of legalese). I find it hard to believe anyone takes all this license stuff so seriously - the only reason I have a license /at all/ is because, without one, some folk would be afraid to use the software. So yeah - Intellectual Property Me Arse! - my statement of contept for all this nonsense.

I don't expect everyone to agree with this point of view, but if you're not even prepared to quote me then tough! That's the deal.


>It's not even good grammar!  :)

Of course not. That's on purpose. It sounds funnier if you say it that way
(IMO).


>I'll be releasing my library under MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-license.  So you can still play with it.

But can you import it into a commercial product and then sell that product for money?


>>Unlimited precision decimals would be a very welcome addition to D. I certainly look forward to seeing your class.
>
>And ripping it apart...

Why would I want to do that? I'm nice.


(and in a different post, you said...)
>I write all the time, whether it's code,
>articles, or science fiction.  I just sent off a short story for this year's
>"Strange New Worlds VIII Contest" (Star Trek), so who knows?

Yay! Another sci-fi fan - let's be friends.
Arcane Jill

Walter wrote:

> 
> "Arcane Jill" <Arcane_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:cjgk3m$2762$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>> I'd say that if you're writing a book because someone else wants it, then
> you're
>> writing it for the wrong reasons. Write for the love of writing. You don't
> need
>> anyone else's permission, approval, or even support. If you want to write
> it,
>> just write it.
>>
>> Well, I've been criticised in the past because my thinking is not very "commercial", but that's my take, for what it's worth.
> 
> I do so enjoy your post. I've been successful commercially with products that I wrote to please myself. Products I've written to satisfy the marketing department's take on what people want have all been failures.
> 
> Therefore, I consider the fact that marketing's take on the D project being utter madness as a good omen.

Like you, I have found that marketing dept. suggestions are most useful as contrary indicators.

Most marketing departments are 'fighting the last war' - when, that is, they are not agonizing over where their next martini is going to come from. The mere fact that a company needs a large marketing dept. speaks volumes about the competitiveness of their product in my mind <g>

IMHO, the fact you're creating something new/better is because it is not already done by someone else, and if you like what you are doing the results usually speak for themselves. Combine those two things and you often create something that more than just a few others will find a use for.

>>I'll be releasing my library under MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-license.  So you can still play with it.
>
>But can you import it into a commercial product and then sell that product for money?

Absolutely!  That's one of the advantages of the MPL.  Just ask ActiveState. Their Komodo product is based on Mozilla source code, and it is commercial.

Or you can ask Mitchell Baker, who wrote the MPL and is the Chief Lizard Wrangler for mozilla.org.

>>And ripping it apart...
>
>Why would I want to do that? I'm nice.

I don't want people to be nice to my code.  I want them to find the bugs and fix them.  :)

Now, you can be nice to me...

Alex

"Dave" <Dave_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:cjjq1o$19hd$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> Like you, I have found that marketing dept. suggestions are most useful as contrary indicators.
>
> Most marketing departments are 'fighting the last war' - when, that is,
they
> are not agonizing over where their next martini is going to come from. The mere fact that a company needs a large marketing dept. speaks volumes
about
> the competitiveness of their product in my mind <g>
>
> IMHO, the fact you're creating something new/better is because it is not already done by someone else, and if you like what you are doing the results usually speak for themselves. Combine those two things and you often create something that more than just a few others will find a use for.

You also have to be careful about information taken from customer surveys. For example, a programmer once argued that the speed of product X was the most important issue of all, and he expounded at length about it. His arguments were very convincing. Until it turned out that he used Brand Y, which was the slowest (by a factor of 4) implementation of X on the market. In reality, X's speed was at the bottom of his list of issues.

Why people buy product A instead of B is a very interesting issue, and is often not so easy to find out.