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Re: [Chicken-hackers] why Chicken?


From: Brandon J. Van Every
Subject: Re: [Chicken-hackers] why Chicken?
Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2007 19:44:16 -0800
User-agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 (Windows/20061207)

felix winkelmann wrote:


All this *is* gruntwork, that's true and I can understand everybody who
gets tired of it. I really do, since I'm tired of it myself. What I
usually do in
those moments is googling madly for the one ultimate programming tool:
the language that is pure elegance and simplicity, the implementation
that is halfway portable,
has a codebase that isn't a complete mess and provides enough functionality or a decent FFI, so I can hack together all that I need myself. I search and search and ultimately find: there isn't anything that really is much of an
improvement over Chicken.

'Twas my conclusion as well. I meticulously searched the web for 2 solid years, looking for uber language tools. They don't exist. None of the academic projects have either the level of funding, or the level of motivation, necessary to solve the problem. Researchers only get so far with their languages because they're only researchers. They aren't trying to solve hard industrial problems, they don't even like those problems for the most part. Really they've taken an exit route where they can contemplate language theory in an ivory tower, get paid for it, and not have to sully themselves with more basic concerns. Like, "Is it actually profitable to use this language, or do I lose money bothering with it?" A researcher will often justify his position as pure research, that some problems have to be pursued in the absence of "bottom line" accountability. I agree with that to an extent. But, how then do you tackle the research problem of making a profit with a language technology? Most researchers simply don't.

Even if they attempt to, projects have vast differentials of resources. You don't get certain things without spending tons of resources. That's why I think community organization is important. When you don't have money, it's about the only way to increase your resources. None of us have thought of any technologies that are going to make our programming lives magically easier. So lacking that, we have to organize ourselves better, if we want more resources.


I don't know "why Chicken", I can only judge for myself - its the "road of least suckage" for me (which should tell you something about how incredibly bad todays software is. Or yesterdays. We are still in the stone age. No, we are
million years before that).

Anyway, thanks for your honest and well-meaning opinion.

One thing that has kept me going, is we're on the same page about what software is and isn't! So I know that when I bring up this sort of thing, and propose to do something about it, it doesn't fall on deaf ears.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every





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