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	Tue, 20 Oct 2015 10:18:11 -0700 (PDT)
Date:	Tue, 20 Oct 2015 20:18:07 +0300
From:	"Vladimir Zhbanov (vzhbanov AT gmail DOT com) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com]" <geda-user AT delorie DOT com>
To:	geda-user AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: [geda-user] A lesson from gnet-makefile
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Hi Kai-Martin,

On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 11:27:29PM +0200, Kai-Martin Knaak wrote:
> 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
You've made my day, Kai-Martin :) You seem to have been reed all the C
books on that list? Or maybe this shows C is the most difficult of all?
;) Looking at your data I think the most appropriate language for
scripting in gEDA is php :)

> 
> 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.
I've read only one textbook on C (indeed, I cannot recall if I've read
even a half of it :), though I keep trying to read something every now
and then). Now I'm reading my first book on Scheme [1]. I don't even
know if I could end this reading at all taking into consideration the
amount of nonsense on Scheme^W^W^W useful info I'm forced to read on
the list :) BTW, for uninitiated, much more info on Scheme can be found
at [2].

> 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 
ANY language needs to be learned. In high school where I was a student
the two common languages that all students learned were Basic and
Pascal. From my point of view, once Basic seems to be easier than C we
would probably have to replace C with it in the project then :)

> 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. 
What backend are you complained of? Probably most of users do not use
any (most of) backends at all?
 
BTW, have you any difficulties in geda-gaf with Scheme? Can I help you?
Please don't hesitate to ask me privately or on the list what lines of
code are unintelligible for you (while I'm not an expert in Scheme and
just learning it on my own). (I'm not kidding here, I believe it would
be useful not only for you and me).

> 
> I sincerely hope, the project is going to make the elephant irrelevant 
> before it turns itself irrelevant.

BTW, a while ago, on the debian-russian list, someone posted the link
[3]. While it doesn't show popularity of languages, and even there is no
Scheme there, it certainly shows there are several lisp dialects or
'lispish' languages which are still popular enough.

And finally, do you know 'Why Scheme is More Hackable Than C' [4] ?

Cheers,
  Vladimir

[1] http://www.scheme.com/tspl4/
[2] http://schemers.org/
[3] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/
[4] https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Scheme-vs-C.html

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