[Chicken-users] Hackathon roundup

[Peter Bex]

Hello everyone,

This weekend's hackathon was a great success.  Fun was had by all, and lots
of work got done.  Most importantly, a number of new people have become
more active in the project.

Summary
-------

We have accomplished the following things:

- About twenty eggs got their old-style HTML documentation translated to
   the wiki format.
- We managed to break the wiki a couple of times, resulting in improvements
   to svnwiki.
- New syntax for documenting eggs in the wiki was implemented
   (http://chicken.wiki.br/wiki-syntax-chicken).
- We worked on Chicken tutorials for 'blub' programmers, for several
   values of 'blub': Ruby, Python and PHP.  A Chicken for Java tutorial
   is currently in the works, too.
- A document about how to hack on Chicken's core and the release process
   is currently underway.
- The eggs for release 2 of Chicken have found their way from the
   toplevel directory of the repository to the release/2 subdirectory,
   resulting in a clearer layout  of the repos.
- A number of programs on the Great Language Shootout game at
   http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ have been improved so that Chicken
   will get a fairer comparison to other languages who have been
   spending more time on optimizing their shootout programs.

As you can see, the results are quite impressive.  I would like to thank
everyone who participated and made this possible!

What's next?
------------

The hackathon may be over, but work will continue.  We should keep up
the momentum that we have gained during the hackathon and continue working
on the things to do.  There are still lots of eggs with old-style HTML
documentation.  These need to be translated to wiki syntax.  It should
be possible to automatically convert the eggdoc documentation, so these
are not our priority right now.  Furthermore, the
chicken-for-blub-programmers documents can use some attention of 'blub'
language experts.

But most important of all, feel free to work on whatever *you* find
interesting and fun, to improve Chicken even more!

Thanks again, everyone!

Cheers,
Peter
-- 
http://sjamaan.ath.cx
--
"The process of preparing programs for a digital computer
 is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically
 and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic
 experience much like composing poetry or music."
                                                        -- Donald Knuth

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