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

[Karp, Alan]

Your point about "one chance" is right on the mark.  One of the problems we
had with the adoption of e-speak was the decision to announce before we had
a sufficiently stable release.  There was a lot of excitement at first, but
when people saw that it wasn't ready for production use, they went on to
other things.  Now that it's ready, we're having trouble getting that launch
frenzy going again.  On the other hand, a number of our successes have come
from those who started way back when and stuck with us.

_________________________
Alan Karp
Principal Scientist
Decision Technology Department
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories MS 1U-2
1501 Page Mill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304
(650) 857-3967, fax (650) 857-6278
https://ecardfile.com/id/Alan_Karp
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Alan_Karp/
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Marc Stiegler [mailto:marcs@skyhunter.com]
> Sent: Friday, March 02, 2001 11:44 AM
> To: zooko@zooko.com
> Cc: Tyler Close; Ka-Ping Yee; Mark S. Miller; e-lang@eros-os.org
> Subject: [E-Lang] Re: "send more newbies" (was: down with 
> `define' (was:
> newbie syntax: picayune points from a prejudiced programmer))
> 
> 
> > > 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
> 
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