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Re: Good book on Dylan?
"Bruce Hoult" <bruce@hoult.org> wrote in message
bruce-CF4C25.09490601042001@news.nzl.ihugultra.co.nz">news:bruce-CF4C25.09490601042001@news.nzl.ihugultra.co.nz...
>
> 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.
Yeah, I was wondering about that. The only thing that concerned
me was changes to the language between the two implementations,
but it's good to see it's got some grass roots support, if not
commerical support.
> 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.
Visibility can't do any harm, so why not have a public newsgroup?
I personally don't like private mailing lists as they tend to flood my
inbox with junk :-)
> > 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...
Is Apple using it now or have they dropped it?
> 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.
What do you mean by "holding action"?
Bye,
Mark.
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