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faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal that doesn't answer the question.

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal what is your measure of success when it comes to guile? clearly you have one.

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal if you want to measure success in terms of userbase, you're looking at the wrong technology. practically no one uses lisp, any variant of lisp. not even the commercial ones with licenses that are in the 4 or 5 digit range.

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal no surprise there. pretty much everything is easier to pick up than lisp. has been the case for decades.

people can't get past the syntax.

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal what is the failure? syntax? and, why do you care about it if it's a failure (to you)?

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal what's clojure's userbase compared with scala or kotlin? wanna take a guess?

also, a commercial company backs clojure's development. who backs guile's?

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal i've seen arguments for and against lisp's syntax since the early 1990s, so i am familiar with why people aren't jumping on the guile bandwagon. python looks like what they know, lisp doesn't.

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal what is the size of the userbase?

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal clojure is older than kotlin, yet has a much tinier userbase. like, negligible in comparison.

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal there isn't a single scheme or lisp implementation, including ones with support for embedding in other applications (like libscheme, or embeddable common lisp) that have a large userbase. if you think the syntax has nothing to do with it, i'd like to know why people aren't flocking to it.

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal where do you get your numbers from?

if you bring up emacs, well, can't i point out that visual studio code has a lot more users than emacs?

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal and what was their problem with it?

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal people pick up javascript/typescript a lot quicker than emacs, otherwise we'd all be writing and using emacs lisp extensions, right?

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal it's also a different language from the 1970s, with support for dynamic scope, and well-tuned for its task -- emacs. guile (scheme in general) doesn't have that.

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal and have you filed an issue on that?

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal it has momentum, because it's been around for a while. its userbase is, again, tiny compared with visual studio code.

the number of projects you will find to add features and extensions to visual studio code dwarf the ones to add them to emacs, and that's a measure of success you can't argue with.

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal i am not a guile user, by the way.

i just find it illogical to say proprietary software is better because you have trouble with guile.

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal or that free software is bad because you don't want to (or can't) pay for the effort to make it do what you want, as the article suggests.

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal so run a test -- show people vscode and emacs and see which they prefer. i've used emacs since 1993 and i know what people will do.

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal it is more usable because they make money from users.

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal how is it a lie? it's still free! i can still make changes to it!

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal the minute they want to change how vscoe works or how emacs works, the syntax comes to the fore.

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal commercial lisp environments have largely failed, if userbase is a measure of success. they, too, made money from users. they also had far better user interfaces than the alternatives.

users didn't want lisp.

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal i don't run into your problems with free software. clearly, it works for me.

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal the article has no solutions. people who write free software shouldn't be forced to work for free.

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal do you use clojure, or clojurescript?

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal what is YOUR solution to the issue it raises?

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal i find it very hard to accept that the freedom angle is naive, when it lets me use and modify changes to software i would not otherwise have been able to afford.

there's no getting around that. even a 50% usable free solution trumps an expensive proprietary one if you can't afford the proprietary one.

faried nawaz fn
@AbbieNormal when i can't find what i want in the docs, i read the source.

there's nothing preventing people from contributing to documentation for free software, something they usually can't do for proprietary software. if you can't look under the hood to see how it works, you're guessing.

faried nawaz fn

@AbbieNormal but there is copious evidence that shows that being able to contribute to free software does work. pretty much every single open source software in widespread use today got to where it is *because of user contributions.”

the fact that people can and do read the source code, and the license lets them make (and often distribute) changes, is a major advantage over proprietary software.

the fact that some open source maintainers are unwilling to accept some changes from users doesn’t distinguish the community from proprietary software vendors, either. proprietary software vendors are free to ignore user suggestions and requests, and often do. but the fact that everyone can make changes to free software makes it a plus, and there are countless examples of that.

if your major point here is that the documentation sucks, well, no one’s stopping you from writing your own intro guides. lots of free software out there relies on third-party documentation. how much time do you think linus torvalds spent writing HOWTO docs? and yet, their existence contributed to its success.

expecting the maintainers to anticipate all user issues and to do the work that will satisfy everyone is completely unrealistic. you won’t do it for anyone else for free, why would they do it for you?

faried nawaz fn

@AbbieNormal with proprietary software, i cannot change it for myself. how does that make them even remotely comparable?

faried nawaz fn

@AbbieNormal right up to the point where it won’t do what you want or the company drops support for it.

faried nawaz fn

@AbbieNormal I didn’t see any solution that is fair to everyone involved. do you have one?

faried nawaz fn

@AbbieNormal I’m neither going to work for free nor ask anyone to.

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