Re: [Chicken-hackers] let the Windows binary go bye-bye

[Brandon J. Van Every]

John Cowan wrote:

Brandon J. Van Every scripsit:

  

Well, Chicken has the users that it has.  They're the people to ask.  
    

My point is that the people on chicken-users have *already* survived
installation.

I don't see why you conclude this.  People on chicken-users have subscribed to the mailing list, which they probably accessed from the Chicken homepage.  People like myself routinely do due diligence and ask questions before they get themselves into further messes.  The 1st direction in INSTALL-CMake.txt is "If in trouble, please contact me through the Chicken mailing list.  You can subscribe to the list from the Chicken homepage, http://call-with-current-continuation.org."  I noticed there was no such directives in README or README.darcs, so I just added them.

So IMHO the
Right Thing is to go where Windows developers hang out, and ask *them* the
question.  We don't need to assume a knowledge of Chicken or even Scheme.

  

No, familiarity with Scheme, Lisp, and advanced programming languages is part of the question.  There's no point asking people who like their C++ / Java / C# / .NET just fine, thank you very much!  They'll just say, "Why is your language so brain dead that you're even asking this?"  And they'd have a point.  The answer is, "Because Chicken is a small project with few people working on it."  And then they'll say, "So if you're so small, why should we care?"  And they'd have a point.

In contrast, people with experience with boutique High Level Languages are more likely to understand the research / implementation / support difficulties of keeping such projects alive.  Of course, those people can read compilation instructions, and it all works as advertized, so why are we asking them?

This leaves only the intermediate newbie, who should be handheld on the mailing list.

Chicken isn't ready for mass marketing or mass acceptance.  That's just reality.  We shouldn't get confused about what every Windoze d3v3l0pr d00d might want.  Yes, I'd like first rate binaries, but nobody's offering to do the work on it.  I want people to see a first rate source build that's well documented and actually works, not a third rate binary that makes them scream address@hidden about the hardwired installation path.  On Windows you end up with a different drive letter every time you buy a new hard drive or your system bellies up or you decide dual booting is kewl.  Don't tell me I gotta use C:\ 'cuz I ain't gonna!


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every