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From: Kai-Martin Knaak <knaak AT iqo DOT uni-hannover DOT de>
Subject: Re: [geda-user] A lesson from gnet-makefile
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2015 23:27:29 +0200
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Reply-To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com

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