Re: New project leader needed for GNU Sather

[Norbert Nemec]

Hi there,

thanks for your reply. There's little I could say against your statements, but 
for one detail: in open source development, the question of finding volunteers 
is very difficult to calculate! I know that it is hard to understand by 
conventional means that anybody would spend time without earning any money from 
it, but fact is: there have already been thousands of people working on free 
project and the number is not decreasing at all.

I have no idea whether Sather really has a future. There's a ton of languages 
out there and maybe Sather will just be one more to die out. But my opinion is 
that Sather is in some way outstanding in design and maybe there are others who 
think like that as well. It needs some work to bring it to production quality, 
but if it ever gets there, it is no question to me that it will collect it's 
community.

The whole thing is an experiment, and the only reason I can give to anyone for 
investing time into it is the pure fascination of language/compiler design. I 
love that matter and started out on it without much hope about making Sather a 
main-stream language. If others follow up on it, there will always be the 
chance that it has it's breakthrough, but it may as well die just a little 
later.

As a glimpse into the history of computer languages shows, quality has never 
been a reason for success, but since it should not have any negative effect 
either, I believe that Sather might still have chances...

Ciao,
Nobbi

On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 11:43:31AM +0200, Friedrich Dominicus wrote:
> c) I would like to take over the development, but can't affort it. I
> now that GNU software is mostly voluntary work, but the problem with
> that is that you have to find people willing to spend their time on
> it. Now I do think we would qualify for the further development of
> Sather, but we have to fight for earning our living just on the things
> we have.
> 
> d) Sather is an interesting but obviously not a "main-stream"
> languages. I doubt that it even gets a good stand in the GNU
> world. GNUS is IMHO extremly C/C++ centric which comes as no suprise
> on one hand if you see on what they are working (HURD, Linux)
> 
> e) the only people who have heard for Sather are probably Eiffel
> programmers and some people interested in language development. Eiffel
> itself is a very small niche product, so in fact Sather is more than
> less unknown.

-- 
-- ______________________________________________________
-- JESUS CHRIST IS LORD!
--          To Him, even that machine here has to obey...
--
-- _________________________________Norbert "Nobbi" Nemec
-- Hindenburgstr. 44  ...  D-91054 Erlangen  ...  Germany
-- eMail: <address@hidden>   Tel: +49-(0)-9131-204180