Re: Re : [Chicken-users] other leading Schemes

[Brandon J. Van Every]

minh thu wrote:
> > At least with the mainstream languages, there's money in them, you can
> > get paid for them.  If you accidentally become well versed in the trivia
> > of C++, Java, or C#, you can make big $$$$$$ at that.
>
> Do you mean being employed ? Or at least working for out sourced
> project, not in-house project (i.e. the language used is of importance
> for the one who ordered the project) ?
>
> > With a marginal language like Scheme, nobody cares.  You go hungry.
>
> Same question.

Yes I mean being employed or contracting.  I don't think it's easy to 
get into a position to choose literally any language you like, where the 
choice of language doesn't matter.  Most projects have ongoing 
maintenance concerns.  They don't want Scheme because not many 
programmers know it.  They don't want Chicken because few people are 
developing it.  Now there are indeed some problem domains where most 
code is throwaway, or at least perceived to be throwaway.  Web 
administration comes to mind.  Several languages have arisen for this 
sort of task: Perl, Python, Ruby.  But I don't think that's what Chicken 
really has to offer the world.  I see it as a systems language rather 
than a scripting language, an alternative to C++.

> > I'm not ready to give up on Chicken yet, or open source in general.  I
> > think there must be a profitable business model in it somewhere.  But
> > I'm quite aware of all the support and R&D jobs that must get done, to
> > make a language that really is pleasant to use.  So I see community
> > organization as key.
>
> You mean the language is not useable as-is...

I think Chicken could be good for 3D game development.  But it's still 
all theory; nobody has done anything with it.  My needs are all about 
game development.  The barrier I keep facing, is the boredom of OpenGL 
bindings.  Granted there are problems beyond Chicken here as well.  
Build on top of Glew or Glee so that I don't need to do elaborate 
function pointer dances on Windows?  Build on FLTK so I don't have to 
deal with system-specific windowing issues?  Build on an open source 3D 
engine so I don't have to do one from scratch?  And thereby sacrifice 
most of the benefits of Scheme, getting stuck with their ways of 
implementing lists, scene graphs, and memory management?  Or do most of 
these things from scratch in Scheme so that it's "better" and other 
Scheme developers will glom on to Chicken?  This sort of stuff is not 
very exciting.  I see a lot of work doing infrastructure without much gain.

If I had 5 people banging on OpenGL gruntwork problems, none of us would 
have to suffer much.  But probably there aren't 5 such people in the 
Chicken community.  I may be on my own here.

There's a form of the Stag Hunt problem here.  I can inventory 
everyone's skills, but what if nobody has skills of use to me 
personally?  It would be better for me personally, to organize people 
with the skills I need, and recruit them from outside the Chicken 
community if they're not available here.  But focusing narrowly on my 
needs, doesn't lay any groundwork for the Chicken community to grow.

On the other hand, who's actually expressed interest in an inventory of 
community skills yet?  So far, no one.  Now, perhaps everyone's just 
trying to figure out what I'm on about, why it should be bothered with, 
and what we might gain from it. 

> > Academics and students don't feel these issues.  They've got financial
> > support for their work.  So they can work on languages like Scheme that
> > don't make most people any money.
>
> ... but is ok for non-making-money work. right ?

Sure.  Just about every broken thing is ok if you don't care how many 
hours you're spending wasting your time.



Cheers,
Brandon Van Every