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

[John Cowan]

Brandon J. Van Every scripsit:

> 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.

If only more developers were like you!  Most seem to just plow ahead
until they run into the first roadblock, then give up.  And it's not
just developers -- googling for "read the instructions|directions first"
produces more than 30,000 hits.

> 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.

Did you ever take that test in elementary school that begins "Before
doing anything, read all the directions carefully"?

> 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.

No argument there; however, specific familiarity with Scheme is *not*
a requirement.  Look to people who use Perl/Python/Ruby/Lua for Windows,
say, and ask them.

> 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?

The question is not whether they can, but whether they will bother.
And that calls for an empirically tested answer.

> Chicken isn't ready for mass marketing or mass acceptance.  That's just
> reality.

No Scheme implementation ever will be.  That's reality too.

-- 
Said Agatha Christie / To E. Philips Oppenheim  John Cowan
"Who is this Hemingway? / Who is this Proust?   address@hidden
Who is this Vladimir / Whatchamacallum,         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
This neopostrealist / Rabble?" she groused.
        --George Starbuck, Pith and Vinegar