On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 11:41 PM, john skaller <
skal...@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>
> On 19/02/2013, at 5:54 PM, Dobes Vandermeer wrote:
>
> > It's just my opinion, but I don't think you have the resources to
> produce a useful product for everybody.
>
> In my opinion I don't have the resources to produce a useful product for
> ANYBODY.
> That's why I keep asking for help. It takes a team to make even a modest
> programming
> language: compiler, libraries, docs, infrastructure management, marketing.
>
Well, it's useful for you, isn't it? That's one person.
I was starting to work on some of this stuff myself - IDE, documentation --
but I hit a lot of obstacles and stopped. The instability of the language
makes it daunting to document. The confusing terminology annoys me. The
level of indeterminism made me queasy. So ... I'm making games in Lua,
Javascript, trying other things.
> > Making headway in any single market will require some sort of concerted
> effort to serve that particular market better than any alternative they are
> considering.
>
> It depends how you define "market".
Just any distinguishable group of people that might adopt your "product"
would be called a market.
> > Ruby and Scala generated excitement because of their easy to get started
> with (Ruby) / highly parallelised (Scala) web frameworks.
> >
> > haXe is a general purpose language in theory, but in practice used
> mostly for flash and mobile games.
>
> Sure. So what "niche" does C++ occupy?
> Which roughly where Felix is aimed.
>
C++ has enough resources and momentum to fit into many niches. I don't
recall what niche it gained early traction in ... it may have been
education, actually. It seems like a lot of CS teachers wanted to teach
people C++ as a sequel to C; in a way, C++ was clever in riding the
popularity of C and branding itself as C 2.0 rather than a new language.
Even D and C# are taking the same approach to this. I don't think Felix
is similar enough to other languages to follow that route.
> > I think for programming languages it has rarely been intentional or
> predictable on the part of the language designer where the language ended
> up being adopted.
>
> Yeah, that's my problem. I have no idea.
>
Well, that doesn't mean you can't come up with one and give it a test. You
could divide up the website into sections based on different groups and and
use your website analytics to see which ones people click on the most. It
might be a clue. For example you could have links to pages specifically
about using Felix for Game Programming, Web Development, High Performance
Computing... each with a tailored list of features that appeal to those
groups. Then track your funnel and see based on what percentage of people
go to the download page, whether they passed through one of those pages
first. This can at least give some hints.
Talking to people is really helpful, too ... hit up some local networking
events and meetups with a printed brochure and see how people react to
different bullet points on there.. What's clear, what's relevant ...
> The problem is that whilst Felix is probably already the best
> language around for game development -- by a very significant
> margin .. it lacks the required library support. And games need
> a LOT of library support.
>
As a game developer ... I don't have any sense that Felix is "already the
best language around for game development". It's not even the "least bad"
language for game development ... otherwise I'd be using it right now.
It's probably a good idea to find some common ground with what other
people think as a starting point so you can walk them from there into some
sort of interest and commitment to Felix as a platform.
Anyhow my thing is: I'm NOT going to write game libraries.
> I can't. It's too much.
>
Just providing a wrapper around Cocos2D-x or some other popular library and
a translation of a few of their examples and tutorials would be big step
forward.
My role is to support library developers, that is, to make
> the general tools the people that make tools
> for the retail tool makers need.
>
Well, what would attract a library developer to your platform? Usually ...
it's users, right?
One of the issues that you are bumping up against repeatly is that you are
not overly interested in the different reality that other people live in.
Until you take up a real interest in such matters, your product will
continue to serve only you because you will not be able to even understand
what your platform looks like to other people.
It's not easy, but possible.
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