[E-Lang] Re: "send more newbies" (was: down with `define' (was: newbie syntax: picayune points from a prejudiced programmer))

[Marc Stiegler]

> > The correct answer, of course, is to get 10,000 programmers to
investigate
> > the language, and see what they say...which is where we circle back
around
> > and bite ourselves with the original problem :-)
>
>
> I would be willing to put an article on Advogato advertising E's
> features and asking for "how easy is it to learn" testers.  I would say
> something to make people think that it would be only a small time
> commitment, like "if you can't write a small secure distributed
> application, and enjoy it, within four hours of starting
> _E_in_a_Walnut_, then we want to know why not".
>
>
> Which is true, even if the antecedent is usually false.  :-)

I think this is a great thing to do at some point, but my own personal
belief is that it is too early to do so. A lesson I learned hard a decade
ago was, "you only get one first launch". In the age of the Web, this is
still true, though I'm not sure whether it is more true or less true: on the
one hand, you can launch every day, as open source projects do in some
sense, and there are some examples of slow-growth-huge-successes like Linux.
On the other hand, it is even harder now than it was ten years ago to get
someone's attention, there are so many things being screamed at us. I
suspect Linux would have a harder time collecting adherents today than it
had just a couple years ago. I was forcefully reminded of this at the P2P
conference, where I had trouble making people pay attention to E even when
they were paid full-time to explore new software tools. So the first time
you get someone's eyeball is probably the last unless:

a) you hook them right off, or
b) you hook so many other people that it eventually comes back around
word-of-mouth with such force that they decide they'll take another stab at
it.

I don't think we want to publicize E until the comm system is reintegrated,
and until we have settled these basic syntax issues (I can't think of
anything worse than having newbies reading these threads right now, where we
are discussing making every E program ever written unexecutable without a
dozen transformations; I desperately wish I could postpone this nationwide
radio broadcast I'm doing Sunday for a month), until the book correctly
reflects the new syntax, and until persistence is operational, because the
absence of persistence enormously truncates the number of useful distributed
systems you can build.

So I think what you have described is a great idea before we put a 1.0 stamp
on it, whether today is a good day is less clear.

--marcs