Mail Archives: geda-user/2015/10/19/17:27:59
John Griessen wrote:
> All right! Maybe you can tune us up on writing scheme!
>
Even if we all turned into guile adepts, the elephant in the room remains:
Lack of guile popularity in the general population of users.
The difference in popularity between guile/scheme and python, perl or php
is not only perceptible but huge. A reasonable yardstick is the number of
books available in the computer programming department of amazon.
c → 12038
python → 1236
perl → 816
ruby→ 556
php → 2705
scheme → 72
guile → 4
Yes, this is two and a half orders of magnitude differential between and
guile. For every title about scheme (and guile) there are 158 books on c.
I wouldn't be surprised if the number of books sold is even more extreme.
In a volunteer project users are the (only) reservoir contributers can
grow from. A language that needs to be learned just to grasp what code is
about, is a considerable entry barrier. The more you emphasize guile, the
more the barrier raises. In my humble opinion, this damages the project in
the long run. It already has done so since about 15 years. We see the
result in the number of active developers of back-ends.
I sincerely hope, the project is going to make the elephant irrelevant
before it turns itself irrelevant.
---<)kaimartin(>---
--
Kai-Martin Knaak tel: +49-511-762-2895
Universität Hannover, Inst. für Quantenoptik fax: +49-511-762-2211
Welfengarten 1, 30167 Hannover http://www.iqo.uni-hannover.de
GPG key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=Knaak+kmk&op=get
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