Re: guile user base

["Anton Vidovic" <anton.vidovic@gmx.de>]

Hello,

I'm not subscribed to this ML, so please forgive me for breaking your
thread.

> In your opinion, how does guile user community compare (in size)
> with other free schemes user communities?

Compared by the number of installations alone, guile is probably the
most widely installed Scheme at all.

Contributing to that is the fact that it is a core dependency of the
game Aisle Riot, which is part of Gnome Games, which has been
installed by default on every Ubuntu installation for the last several
years, and probably by other Gnome centric distributions too.

* http://packages.debian.org/sid/aisleriot

* http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=racket+chicken-bin+guile-1.8+&show_installed=on&want_legend=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1

More general, guile is probably also the most widely installed Lisp,
dwarfed in the number of installations maybe only by Emacs+Elisp.

> I am under the impression that guile user base is somewhat smaller
> than chicken' or racket', but to what extent?

One indicator could be the number of third party modules. The number
of chicken eggs

* http://wiki.call-cc.org/chicken-projects/egg-index-4.html

and racket PLaneT

* http://planet.racket-lang.org/

easily shadow the number of guile projects

* http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/gnu-guile-projects.html

> And how could we roughly figure this out? Also, how well is the user
> base growing since v2 came out? Do we have some download stats for
> instance?

I think, without checking anything, that the average number of users
on #guile has at least doubled since 2.0, going from roughly ~15 to
~40.

> Because I stumbled upon the Chicken Gazette[1] today, and I'm
> wondering whether it would make sens for Guile to have a similar
> regular source of news?

I think that there doesnt happen enough in Guile land to justify
having an own newspaper. Also such a news and the effort put in
quickly becomes obsolete. Nobody cares for last months news any more.
The effort is better spent elsewhere.

From a casual user point of view, Guile in its current stage of world
domination needs other things first, so if you have time to waste,
consider to sink it into one of these:

* Most importantly, a Wiki.

* A web forum, the ML might be too exotic for "normal users".
  guile-devel can stay a ML, but guile-help should become a
  forum/wiki.

* More programming examples and entry points for newbies.

Considering that guile's (correct me if I'm wrong) goal of being the
"official" high level language of the whole GNU system, and thus to
get more, many more users, it is not that easy to get into.

First, it is a Lisp, which is nowadays exotic enough to scare away a
substantial number of users. Second, it is a Scheme, which is as
exotic in the Lisp universe as Lisp itself is exotic in the global
programming universe. Third, even in the Scheme universe, Guile is a
rather exotic choice compared to Chicken and Racket, so people
managing to get all the way to the Scheme universe are still unlikely
to land in Guile land.

If you dont know a Lisp already, say Elisp or Common Lisp, getting
into Guile by Guile documentation alone is a substantial task, since
the only existing documentation, the manual, is written more in the
terse style of a man page than "Learn Python the hard way" or "Land of
Lisp". It also does not promote Guile as being a general programming
language like Python/Ruby/Perl, but as "just" an extension language
for programs written in more "serious" languages.

* A mighty "batteries included" distribution.

This was adressed also in the Chicken gazette issue you mentioned.
Additionally to getting a online package repository, which is
thankfully being worked on, Guile needs a "batteries included"
distribution similar to the Haskell platform

* http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/

or Lispbox

* http://www.common-lisp.net/project/lispbox/

Which means, it should be available not only for GNU/Linux, but for
all major platforms including the proprietary ones, be an easy,
prepackaged clickety-click install for absolute newbies to be able to
start it, dabble and get comfortable with it, play around with easy
examples, create a GUI (GTK, ncurses) or a web app, etc, in general,
have no entry tresholds. I mean, 2.0 only recently entered sid, and
Ubuntu 11.10 is still shipping 1.8. So the supposed Guile newbie is,
to get started with 2.0, in 2011, still supposed to first build the
whole Guile chain himself to even get started.

If newbies can not start learning with guile, they'll start learning
with python or ruby and then stay there. Not only Guile, but the whole
Lisp ecosystem in general is risking it's future by catering only to
"hackers" and cutting off new blood.

Thanks for reading,
Anton

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