Rhythmic Fistman wrote: > > A searchable news group is hardly unprofessional. > What's unprofessional is that googling "lightweight > threads", "game scripting languages" or > "c10k solutions" returns zero felix results. > Nobody who wants to do any of these things sits down > and types in "felix language", and even if they did > they still might not find us.
Agreed. The sad fact is that one has to figure out a way to attract followers. In order to do this, there must exist some decent applications, for starters. Also, developing real applications is a good way to settle priorities in the language. Cool features that are not obviously useful in production become much less interesting, for example (I have no - almost no - prejudice about what Felix features would fall into this category. ;) Also, speaking as a lurker who doesn't hack C++ or OCaml, Felix is pretty daunting in many ways. Perhaps it's a bit premature to start a "felix-users" list (seeing as there are no users), but most curious would-be followers who'd peek at the felix-language mailing list would most likely shy away at the sight of discussions on functors, type classes, etc. If you agree on who the target users are, and what the target applications are, the logical next steps would be to define some first applications, and work on the documentation so that it appeals to the intended target audience. None of this is easily done, and it by no means guarantees success. My own interest in Felix is as a type-safe low-level extension to Erlang. Erlang started out in Ericsson's CS Lab, with a very clear target (figure out how to develop the telephony exchanges of the future - or in practice: make something like PLEX(*), only better.) The target audience was also very clear, and there were some impressive first (and second, and third...) applications. One could argue that Erlang didn't start gaining momentum until around 1998 (6 years after the language stabilized), and we're now seeing some significant movement and acceptance (after 14 years). Some other languages have had a faster and stronger rise to fame, but for that to happen, you need to find a niche just before it becomes the next great success, or have a huge marketing budget, or both (as was the case with Java). (*) http://www.ericsson.com/ericsson/corpinfo/publications/review/2001_01/fi les/2001013.pdf One could imagine that Felix would go very nicely together with the APZ Virtual Machine, but the requirements on reliability, support etc are huge in this environment. You need considerable credibility before you can even be considered for something like that. BR, Ulf W ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Felix-language mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/felix-language
