Re: The activity level of dylan.

[Bruce Hoult <address@hidden>]

In article <419316d4.0203071732.3ecfd9ef@posting.google.com>,
 mnoconnor@hotmail.com (Matthew O'Connor) wrote:

> I was wondering about the current (I guess you would
> call it) vibrancy of Dylan.
> 
> I tend to judge the activity of a language by the
> activity on the news groups. Dylan doesn't seem to
> have much activity compared to other languages.
> Even those with a relatively small user base.
> 
> So what is the current status of Dylan? Is the user 
> base growing or shrinking? Are new libraries being
> added to it?

By my count, the gd-hackers mailing list has had 60 messages in the last 
seven days.  There's some good solid bugfixing and new development going 
on there.

I don't know if the number of users is increasing or decreasing.  We get 
new people posting fairly frequently, and sometimes we notice that old 
friends haven't been around for a while (and sometimes they turn up with 
a big cvs commit session six months later...).

With most things, i understand that it is fewer than 10% of people who 
read a newsgroup or a mailing list who actually post.  I don't know if 
that applies to Dylan, but I recall Andreas Bogk saying that a new 
version of Gwydion Dylan pretty quickly gets several hundred downloads.


One difficulty is that it's very hard to get employers to allow you to 
write things in a language they've never heard of.  Until they've 
firstly heard the name, and secondly heard good things about it, it's 
very hard to persuade people to use something other than C++ or Java or 
Perl.  Which means that until that happens, those of us who like Dylan 
are pretty much forced to use it at the hobby level rather than the 
professional level.

I was interviewing for a job in early September.  I happened to mention 
Dylan.  The technical person I was talking to said they'd heard of it 
because according to a discussion of the ICFP programming contest on 
Slashdot that day, someone had won 2nd prize using it.  I invited them 
to double check the names of the people involved (I was one of them).  I 
believe that impressed them.  Not enough to let me use Dylan in their 
shrink-wrapped applications.  Yet :-)

But I think things such as ICFP can help to gain traction for Dylan.  I 
still get, six months later, about a dozen hits a day on my writeup for 
our ICFP contest entry.


There was an announcement here recently of a "DSP" system.  I'm quite 
excited about that.  Dylan is far better suited to doing scripting-type 
work inside a web page than is Java, and I think it could do very well 
in this application.  I'd like to see this system working with Gwydion 
Dylan, and am intending to take a look at it soon.  This is also the 
sort of area that has historically proven to be a good one for sneaking 
new languages into companies.

-- Bruce