I feel Falcon is a good language

[sailor...@gmail.com]

But why it seems so unpopular ? And when 1.0 will be out?

[Giancarlo Niccolai]

Il giorno 11/feb/10, alle ore 03:39, sailor...@gmail.com ha scritto:

> But why it seems so unpopular ? And when 1.0 will be out?

I think the "unpolularity" is mainly due to 3 reasons:

- We're new. We went "distro" just a couple of years ago (actually,
december 2007), and started to make a bit of "ads" about one year ago.
A couple of years is the minimum to be "noticed" in this field;
even .NET languages, with all the power of Microsoft behind them, took
no less than a couple of years to be at least considered...

- We still have a small set of bindings. We concentrated in the
development of the engine, and modules production still need a bit of
handly care. We have an automatic binding system working with C, and
we're adapting it to C++ libraries, but it's still experimental.

- We miss a killer application. On this regard, we have started
"nest", a 'revolutionary' web application framework, and we're
allocating all our main devel resources to that, starting this week
(first, we had to stabilize 0.9.6, which happened last week). Consider
it a "durpal with steroids" and written in Falcon.

- We miss media coverage. With this regard, we have readied a program
called TEG (the evolution game); we plan to start a contest for Falcon
programmers based on this game: self-evolutionary program fighting
each other for supremacy :-). The code is standing, and we're issuing
a stable version on Win, Lin and Mac asap. Then, it's a matter of 2
phase announce: 1) call for ideas; a couple of months in which we want
to select the rules that may make the game more interesting from our
users comment, and 2) the contest itself.

1.0 was planned by june of this year; we went a couple of months late
because of unexpected bugs, and rescheduling of other features (i.e.
falpack) sooner in time, but OTHO we're very probably having new hands
coding in this days + more commitment from the core developers, so
it's still not unlikely that we can reach 1.0 by july. Steps are very
probably:

- 0.9.8: phoenix (april) with redesign of the compiler-module system
and introduction of first optimizations. Math bignums and a better
stream support (a set of more platform-specific file and directory
handlers) should be in as well.

- 0.9.10: (may-june) - with type contracts and rule-based programming
(the heart of it, continuations, that we need to select branchpoints
are already in). And more compiler optimizations.

Since 1.0 we'll concentrate in cleaning docs, supporting stable
embedders, writing tons of modules and so on.

Giancarlo.

[Klaim]

About the media coverage, I think there are some things that could be done easily and would help build a more inviting dialog space  for people curious enough to get to the website :

 - have some kind of forum instead of a group : it's not that mail groups are bad, it's more that it's often perceived as obscure elite expert discussion tools. A forum is more "graphic" and have a more space-oriented way of organize informations. It would, I think really help to have the archive of messages available easily and in a more inviting way like a forum. I don't personally care if it's on a forum or not, I just think it would help to create the discussion between curious developpers, the language's developers and the conquered users;

 - there is no RSS (or any other thing like that) on the website, making you have to memorize about the languge to come on the website often to see what's new;

The forum point is also a good thing when some decisions will be made on discussions in wich external user might add some input.  

Anyway, I'd really like my game to be one of the killer apps for Falcon... but I'm really slow to build it at the moment ^^; That said once donce I'll make sure technical people know wich tools were used to build it (lot of open-source). 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FalconPL" group.
To post to this group, send email to falc...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to falconpl+u...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/falconpl?hl=en.

[Klaim]

By the way, Yesterday I've started talking about Falcon in a scripting language thread on TIGSource : http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=9707.30
You might also want to read and add precisions :)

[Earl Montgomery]

I learned about the existence of a handful of languages while perusing around RosettaCode.org with Falcon being one of those languages.  When I finally began to use Falcon I was very impressed.  I noticed that there were not many Falcon entries in RosettaCode.  Among the 800+ languages listed on there, I was surprised I found Falcon.  If not for RosettaCode I might not have found Falcon.

I am new to Falcon but I managed to add some Falcon entries to RosettaCode, thus boosting the awareness of it.

The people who frequent RosettaCode are programmers and developers who seem to truly have a love for programming.  The more of them that Falcon reaches the greater chance of Falcon reaching the professors and scientists of this world.  Possibly more Falcon entries on RosettaCode will boost its popularity.

I will copy this message to a more current post