Even for blue-sky projects without any legacy lock-in, I don't fancy our chances with the enterprise/MIS crowd. They tend to favor straight-jacket languages, and for good reason!
For some guy running a two-man startup, something like Racket is a super weapon. For a large organization--with any staff turnaround at all--metaprogramming is cancer. They need a "paper trail" for the next guy to follow. On Wednesday, December 26, 2018 at 3:51:03 PM UTC-6, spdegabrielle wrote: > > Hi Matthew, Neil, > > > the people who are persuadable. > So who are the ‘persuadable’? And where to find them if not on hn? > > I’m one of the ‘corporate MIS programmers’, but in the public > sector(health), and I get to interact with a variety of software vendors as > well as and build forms, worklists, reports and business logic on their > platforms. I certainly don’t get to choose. > > My role does put me in the lucky position to ask ISV’s what languages > their systems are written in; > Example include (from older to newer) > * COBOL > * VB.6 (two vendors) > * ASP.net, C# & JavaScript (more recent vendor) > * PHP w/Symfony & Python > * Ruby on Rails > * Java > * Perl > * Cache/MUMPS (two vendors - one is actually the customer of the other) > [ these are all ‘single product vendors’ - I don’t know if that is unusual > in industry ] > > In all the cases it seems the language is determined by the founder, and > has not changed for the life of the product & company, in some cases for > many years (the cobol and VB products have been around for 20+ years) > > I’ve even met some of the founders - 3 out of 4 are specialty doctors. > > I will have to ask next time I meet a founder, but at this stage I don’t > think any ‘choosing a language’ was involved - I think the founders I have > met just chose whatever was available at the time. (if you a meet a > potential founder please say ‘have you looked at Racket?’) > > I had to type this to put it together in my head - maybe I shouldn’t have > sent it and bored you with my thought processes. > > So who are the ‘persuadable’? And where to find them? > > Kind regards, > > Stephen > > PS in my workplace the biggest competitor isn’t other languages, it is the > spreadsheet; sometimes stand alone, sometimes linked or shared, but mostly > with no VBA. > > PPS I think the Jupyter enhanced REPL idea is worth pursuing and extending > as this might be a way generate interest in the Racket runtime and > associated languages. > > > > > On Wed, 26 Dec 2018 at 18:50, Matthew Butterick <m...@mbtype.com > <javascript:>> wrote: > >> I agree that success stories are helpful. I'll go one better — I think it >> would be great to have a section of the main Racket website devoted to >> these stories that show who uses Racket and how / why (inside & outside >> academia). This could be done in an interview-style format, like Jesse >> Alama's recent book about language-making in Racket [1]. Photos also. I >> would be happy to contribute design & layout if a sufficiently motivated >> collaborator — you, Neil? — wanted to conduct the interviews & gather the >> material. >> >> I find the idea of doing language advocacy *on* Hacker News (or Stack >> Overflow, or Quora, etc.) to be weird. Not because I'm a curmudgeon. But >> rather because it's inherently low-leverage, and misses a lot of the people >> who are persuadable. >> >> [1] https://languagemakers.net/anthropology/ >> >> >> >> On Dec 26, 2018, at 6:51 AM, Neil Van Dyke <ne...@neilvandyke.org >> <javascript:>> wrote: >> >> I want to see more people making a living working with/on Racket (outside >> of professorships, and grad student slave stipends), and I think that means >> a lot more companies using it for substantial projects, and I suspect the >> best bet is startups who can choose their tools (and are funded as >> gambles), and I suspect the best bet for that is getting HN startup success >> stories like: "we got to launch and ___ funding round, with Racket, because >> DSLs, and Racket is the best for that". Then other HN people will see a >> success story, a couple might be inspired to think about DSLs for their own >> startup idea, and then somehow this becomes RACKET EXPONENTIAL EXPLOSION. >> Or at least more people making a living working with/on Racket. >> >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Racket Users" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to racket-users...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> > -- > ---- > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
