On Thu, 27 Jan 2011, Duke Normandin wrote:

> On Thu, 27 Jan 2011, John Sampson wrote:
>
> > My concern is not that Unicon is deficient but there seems to be so
> > much unrealised potential in a language well ahead of its time.
> 
> Ummmm... Do you have any recommendation(s) for a solution?

Excuse me jumping in, but I have some points which may be useful
here.  Nowadays, if it isn't on the web, it doesn't exist.  There
seem to be no blogs about Unicon.  Tried Google and Duck Duck Go and
unicon.net seems to dominate, which is nothing to do with the
language (I think).  The sourceforge Unicon page seems to go for 6
month periods without updates, which doesn't make it look like an
active project.   There seems to be no news about stable releases,
or betas.  There doesn't seem to be a date on

http://unicon.sourceforge.net/status.html

and if memory serves, that page hasn't changed for while.

So what about the early adopters, who would happily plunge into the
source, whatever?  Well, I've found the backtracking really
difficult to get my head round, which may just be me because I
didn't find Prolog easy, but my point is that backtracking will make
some tasks much easier, but takes some mastery.  So there needs to
be a more visible community of practice, explaining to people what
benefits they can get from Unicon, and how to do that, in real world
cases.  If there are people in large companies using it for
interesting things, that could be useful: it seemed to help Ruby in
the pre-Rails days.  There was a wiki (which got killed by spammers)
with all sorts of useful info on like that.

I think too many language discussions focus on what is inside the
language ("does it have closures, or continuations, or monitors,
or...") whereas to get people to use something you need to show them
what it can do easily.  For example, when I discovered Tk it was
remarkable how easy it was to create practical GUIs.  When I
discovered Perl4 it was a pleasure not have to shunt "out of band"
data between the shell and awk to get varying behaviour.

I hope there's something practical in there people can use.

        Hugh

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