On Fri, 28 Jan 2011, Clinton Jeffery wrote:
[...]
> Within this community, everyone is welcome to their own opinion about what
> language is best or what is needed in order to make Unicon more popular.
> However, the main impacts in the Unicon community are made by those folks
> who DO something to advance the language. Talking counts... when it leads to
Fair enough, and this is a common problem in open source. People
might be helped by a current list of what needs doing. This is
because people have different skill sets and could match them to the
list better, and because a list of what is needed guides activity
into directions that fit in with the intended goals.
The help wanted page
http://unicon.sourceforge.net/helpwanted.html
which I link to on my list of projects page
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~hgs/projects/#other_projects
is good, but maybe it could do with a few dates on it to show which things
are current. Also, some of the topics refer to things which are needed
for background. It would be helpful if they could be made into links
so it is easy for people to follow them up. Clearly such a change will
take time.
[...]
>
> I like many of the comments in this thread and am responding to some of
> them, not just to Michael. The "showing what the language can do" idea is
> fundamental. The Unicon book tries hard to do that, but it is just a
Yes, I was not intending anything negative about the book. I just
think that in the regrettably shallow culture of "TL;DR" much of
this needs to be on web pages. I'm not even fluent in Icon or
Unicon these days, and I'll have to relearn it. The different
slants of such sites would help me get back to a stage where I could
contribute something useful, as well.
> beginning. The best way to show what the language can do is to open the code
> contribution doors wider to whomever chooses to share things that they've
> written in Unicon. The range of backgrounds and interests in this community
There used to be calls on this list for contributions to The
Generator, didn't there? Maybe my memory is failing me!
> is remarkable. For my part, I shared much of the early stuff I did directly
> in chapters of the Unicon book. Since then I've drafted a book on computer
> games in Unicon (about half-written), and we've written a 3D multi-user
> virtual environment in Unicon (which will need a book to tell its story, if
> it ever gets finished). The main external customers have some pretty
> awesome Unicon programs but they are not demo programs to be shared or used
> for language marketing purposes. :-)
It doesn't matter if they are open. If they chose Unicon for the
project for reasons they can state, that is marketing. There are
enough other languages they could have chosen, but didn't. If the
projects are interesting, then people will want to learn the
language because of what is being done with it, even if the language
choice isn't really the reason for the project's success.
>
> I am not sure how to best market Unicon, I am a CS professor not a marketer.
> But I agree with the comment that we need a webmaster, among other volunteer
> positions. I have been unable, apparently, to do my day job well and also
> keep source code distributions, documentation, and website very up to date.
Agreed, it isn't easy.
> I continue to work on that, and may improve some. The kids are getting older
> now and taking less of my time :-). I have also allowed students to help
> some with code updates, but their main job is to do research, as is mine.
> Research with Unicon originally was to drag Icon kicking and screaming into
> the modern age of computing. I think we've been very busy doing that and not
> doing promotion or community development. With the threads facility nearing
> beta we are nearing another major leap forward, but unless you were into
> updating source code and reading conference papers and asking questions, you
> probably haven't been told much about the past few years' work on Unicon.
OK, well could the CVS (or svn, or whatever) have commit hooks that
appended (or prepended) something to some page on the website,
without human intervention? (Would it make sense to do that in
Unicon, as a marketing strategy?) It would help make the activity
visible to the community. Maybe I'm being old fashioned, and this
stuff gets "tweeted" these days!
> Sorry!
I don't think you need to apologise, it's all extra work until it is
automated, I'm just wondering about whether these things would help,
by comparison with other popular languages. Are they small enough
changes to be relatively easy to do? Obviously not instantly!
Does the fact that many of them involve text manipulation mean that
Unicon is a really good way to do them? For example, one of the early
projects that Rubyists plugged was that the news<->email gateway was
written in (I think) about 200 lines of Ruby.
>
> In any case, this response is not intended to finish the thread, please keep
> the comments, questions, and calls-to-action coming.
>
> Cheers,
> Clint
>
[...]
Hugh
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