Re: [Chicken-users] Rewriting Svnwiki in Java or PHP

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Zbigniew wrote:
> Bigloo has fewer resources going into wikis, extensions, and
> cross-platform builds.  That's more resources for your program.

IIUYC, you're saying the fairly small Bigloo community doesn't have much 
to do, and would be ready and eager to take on a fairly arbitrary 
project, such as SvnWiki.  Whereas the Chicken community is larger, but 
people all have their own areas of specialty, and are pretty busy with 
their own concerns.  To this I say: I seriously doubt the Bigloo 
volunteers have time on their hands like you suggest.  You'd better go 
ask 'em before billing them as a readily available labor pool.  It is 
far more likely that they have as much energy per volunteer as any open 
source community: very little .  And we do know that Bigloo's community 
is smaller, with less effort made towards the infrastructural concerns 
(wikis, extensions, cross-platform builds) that make systems more widely 
useful and attract more developers.

> [...]
>
> Bigloo's build is based on GNU Autoconf, which is much easier to
> program with when dealing with a large project such as a web page.

Why is that?  I presume you're speaking from experience, programming 
both GNU Autoconf and CMake "in the large?"  Or are you speaking from 
prejudice, that you know GNU Autoconf, lotsa other people know GNU 
Autoconf, and you have no idea if CMake offers any advantages or 
disadvantages, other than it's not GNU Autoconf?  FWIW CMake is good 
enough for KDE, and for them it was better than SCons, so I'm not 
inclined to believe any a priori assertion that there's a problem with 
programming CMake in the large.  I'd like to hear specific details about 
what's an enabler or disabler in either build system.

Why is Bigloo or Chicken's build even an issue here?  Since when do we 
build Scheme itself to implement a Scheme application?  Or is there 
something exotic in SvnWiki's principle of operation that I'm not aware 
of?  I wasn't aware that the build system was of any concern to the 
Scheme programmer at all, other than it builds, it builds on my system, 
and it builds without me tearing my hair out.

> Finally, a major advantage of Bigloo over Chicken Scheme is that
> Bigloo does not have Scheme in its name.  This is critical for your
> goals.

I really doubt that, considering that "Bigloo is a Scheme 
implementation..." is the 1st statement on its homepage.  If marketing 
is really the dealbreaker, we can canonically refer to "Chicken" when 
dealing with people who are scared of Scheme.  But I think this is 
silliness.  It's not that it's Scheme.  It's that it's not a mainstream 
web language, i.e. Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, or Perl, that lotsa people 
already know.  You simply aren't going to get a lot of people arseing 
themselves to learn a new, non-mainstream, somewhat weird language.  The 
labor pool is inherently limited.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every