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Dylan's direction

Hi everyone,
   I have been thinking lately of where the dylan 
language is heading. We have had some very interesting events 
occur recently with the creation of Functional Objects, Inc. and 
the expected release of a 2.0 version of a dylan programming 
environment for windows. Plus, the work being done by the GD 
people is really turning that project into a serious possibility 
on unix boxes. Also, we are seeing some crossover between the 
GD people and the Functional Objects people which will benefit 
everyone. All of this suggests that dylan is growing and has a 
future, but just what this future is I am not so sure. 
   The question becomes do we have a vision? I personally like 
the idea of dylan becoming an important web technology. Other 
languages like java, javascript, perl, python, etc. have enjoyed 
much success lately mostly due to their web tie-ins. This seems 
like an area Dylan would do well in, but writing the modules and 
libraries to make this happen will require much work.
   What type of model should we have going forward? Is our goal to 
increase the popularity of dylan? Make dylan more dev friendly? 
Focus on backwards compatibility? Or look for the next big thing 
and position dylan to take advantage of it? Are we interested in 
applications, network, distributed computing, security?
   I'd like to hear other people's opinions on the future of dylan 
and where people think we should focus our efforts.

James

dylanworld.com
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