Shawn Rutledge wrote:
On 2/11/06, Brandon J. Van Every <address@hidden> wrote:
What is your basic market motive for wanting things to "run
everywhere?" How do you personally benefit from this, aside from some
Like a lot of open source developers I don't know how or if I will
make money. I have a day job for that.
Well it's good you like your day job better than mine. :-) I quit DEC
8 years ago for lack of satisfaction. This was at the height of the
boom. Used credit cards to live, ran out of credit, and by the time I
said "oh oh" the bust was in full swing. Didn't find any computer work
during the bust, discovered signature gathering instead. Declared
bankruptcy last October. At least I have a job that I can stand, its
main advantage is I can do as much or as little work as I want,
whenever I want. Also it's exercise instead of sitting in front of a
desk. Plus sometimes I make good money. Not now though. It'll be a
drag for the next 3 weeks, but then I'll have more measures and it'll
get better.
I'd rather that my work get
unlimited exposure (assuming I get anything worthwhile done :-) rather
than tie it down with licensing fees or retail sales, and
simultaneously have to turn a fun hobby into a stressful drudgery to
meet commercial expectations.
Well, I don't consider getting Chicken builds to run well on Windows to
be "fun hobby." Rather it's stressful drudgery. But, I think it's
tractable, and important to my objectives. I'm starting to eliminate
other toolchains that create more stressful drudgery on top of that
though. I'm starting to learn about Dev-C++ because the MinGW
packaging is really good. So instead of worrying about how to build 10
libraries for The Battle Of Wesnoth, it seems I'm down to 1. Knock on
wood, I haven't proven that those packages are actually reliable enough
to produce a stacked SDL app like Wesnoth. We'll see in another hour
or two.
kind of programmer aesthetic satisfaction that "things have been
perfected?" How will others benefit from this? The problem is, if it's
just your own whim, then nobody else is going to do the maintenance
upkeep on it. So that portability will never happen. People need a
stronger reason for it to happen than "well I'd like it to be that
It has worked that way for some projects. Just some are more popular
than others. The most popular open-source projects have become quite
portable.
Yes, but we're talking about the Scheme universe. You simply aren't
going to get masses of people cooperating on *anything* unless they
have a compelling interest to do so. Fixed point for 3D is definitely
not topical to these people. Even 3D itself isn't, frankly. For
things 3D, the correct strategic place to start is 1 implementation,
say Chicken, that does one thing well, like a 3D engine or an OpenGL
value-add API. If you can do something with that that's relevant in
the real world, like ship a game, then you can probably get people to
pay attention and glom onto the project. That's the position you need
to be in before a fragmented community will start doing things in a
more standardized way.
For 3D there is also the much, much deeper problem that 99.9999999% of
3D developers use C++. I think it's really going to take a "show me
the money" project in Scheme before much of anyone changes their mind,
and even then they'll drag their feet forever. I do hope that
Chicken's C++ interfacing is good enough to provide some conversion
potential.
Cheers,
Brandon Van Every
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