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Re: Good book on Dylan?
In article <7Xpx6.3458$Ph.147637@stones>, "Mark Jordan"
<mark_jordan@nospam.ieee.org> wrote:
> None yet, I like to have a vague clue as to what I'm doing
> before I do it. Man, I can't get over how quiet it is around
> here! Bit like good old NZ eh :-)
It tends to be pretty quiet here in the newsgroup, but there's actually
quite a lot of activity going on in the Gwydion Dylan (the open source
implementation which compiles via C) developer mailing list. I'd say
it averages around half a dozen messages per day, the majority of which
is people discussing improvements being made to the compiler.
I was at a talk a couple of years ago where the speaker put forward the
theory that a big factor in Linux being more sucessful than the xBSDs
was that Linux development took place in newsgroups and a casual
observer could easily find them and immediately see that there was stuff
going on. OTOH, it was hard to find out that FreeBSD existed, and it
looked as if there was nothing going on because all the activity was in
private mailing lists.
> It's no wonder that it's so quiet around here, nobody even knows that
> Dylan exists! I'm beginning to wonder if there's some fatal flaw I haven't
> spotted yet...
Java arrived and got $$ behind it at *exactly* the point that Dylan was
nearly ready to take off, at least in the Mac community. And then Apple
had money problems...
By all rights Dylan should be as dead now as, say, OpenDoc. The fact
that it *isn't* yet dead I think says something about its inherent
worth. There's a bit of a holding action at Fun-O but the Gwydion
developers are moving ahead fairly nicely and using Dylan for real work,
and it's encouranging to see several universities starting to teach
Dylan to undergrads in the past year or so.
-- Bruce
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