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Re: Evidence that Functional Objects is real?

Hi,
  I just wanted to say a few things about FO's efforts. First off,
I've 
been interested in dylan since 94 when it was still at Apple. The
designers 
put a lot of thought into the language and made it one of the best
conceptual 
langauges I have seen. Other langauges are still trying to adopt
features 
dylan had long ago. I don't want to spend too much time talking
about why 
dylan didn't take over the world if it is so good, but needless to
say, it 
has not enjoyed the market success that other languages have. i
mean, it's 
an Apple product, right ;)
  In the years since I became interested, dylan has been on it's
death bed 
more than once. Apple dropped their implementation at the TR level,
which 
made it difficult to do any serious coding on it (exception to those
who 
worked on the ray tracer). The open source version was all but
abandoned 
after the fine people at CMU decided to drop development on d2c,
once the 
2.0 version was done. Harlequin was having trouble getting their 
implementation out the door. What saved dylan was the efforts of
people who 
just love the language. These are mostly volunteers from the open
source side 
and brave souls from the FO side.
   Starting a company is expensive, especially in a market dominated
by 
titans like Microsoft and Sun (C#, asp, java) or free products like
perl, 
php, python, etc. Functional Objects is in a tough market. The
employees 
work very hard and have very limited resources. This means they
can't spend 
tons of money on web site development, or hire someone to take care
of their 
site full time. While this may detract from the business, the
important parts 
are the devlopment tools that they let you download for free to evaluate.
   Lastly, I think it is important to realize that the open source
effort 
and the FO effort are fairly coordinated. Both groups want dylan
code to be 
portable between the implementations. Once this is fully realized,
dylan 
will be able to run on Windows, Mac, MacOSX, Darwin, LinuxPPC, Linux
X86, 
*BSD, HPUX, and a variety of other platforms. So you will have a lot
of 
flexibility in the language and in the tools you choose. Basically, 
developing in dylan would not be a wasted effort and you gain many 
advantages - today.

james


dylanwannabee@nodylanhere.com wrote:
> 
> My boss won't let me use Dylan because he's under the impression that Dylan
> was dumped by Harlequin and picked up by F.O. as a hobby project.  He doesn't
> believe F.O. is a real company with venture capital and employees.  He says
> the owner is probably a contract programmer who does the F.O. work between
> contracts, and probably had his teenager do the F.O. web site.
> 
> What can I say or do to convince my boss to let me use Dylan?  If I can't
> convince him F.O. is a real company, I have to at least be able to convince
> him that it will be possible for us to hire Dylan programmers in the future.
> Is there a Dylan job web site with resumes etc.?
> 
> By the way, my boss is not just automatically saying no to everything I ask.
> He's very reasonable about most things, and always goes out of his way to
> make sure I understand the logic behind all of his decisions that affect my
> work.  He spent thousands of dollars for new hardware for my convenience just
> because I requested it.  It would be easy for me to convince him to let me
> use Dylan if I could find something solid to prove it's not just a hobby.
> 
> Please post replies.  Thanks.
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