Re: Vision for the future...
- Posted by Robert Craig <rds at RapidEuphoria.com> Nov 16, 2002
- 414 views
Jonas Temple writes: > Rob, would it be possible for you to share with the > community (your customers) what your vision is for the > future of Euphoria? Are you wanting the language to become > widespread or just a niche language with a small number > of users? What's your 1,3 and 5 year plans? Of course I want to see Euphoria widely used by lots of people. I've never had a 1, 3 or a 5 year plan, (didn't they disappear with the collapse of the former Soviet Union?). I enjoy doing this kind of work, and I enjoy trying to make money at it. I realize that some people believe that programmers should not be allowed to make money - they should be required to donate their life's work for the good of society. All I can tell you, is that I plan to have a 2.4 alpha-test release within a couple of months. There probably won't be any major new features, but there will be a lot of important small improvements and speed-ups. And there will be around 20 or so bug fixes. Eventually more big features will come. People who judge the progress of Euphoria by the number of features added to the core language with each release, are probably the same people who judge the progress of an airplane design by the number of tons of weight added with each revision. I'm working full-time on Euphoria, minus a tiny amount of time for ListFilter. I did work mainly on ListFilter for a couple of months to get it up and running. Unfortunately most of my time does not (and never did) go into adding new features. e.g. Web advertising, tech support, answering e-mail enquiries and suggestions, reading the huge number of messages posted on this list and answering some of them, updating Recent User Contributions, acquiring resources - I recently secured a couple of hundred additional Mb and 15Gb more bandwidth for Euphoria. I also recently moved all the .zips on AOL over to RapidEuphoria, and all the 45000 mailing list messages over to ListFilter. Then there are the real and imagined bug reports to investigate, packages to ship, business license to renew, tax forms etc. etc. You also shouldn't judge the size of the Euphoria community just by the number of people on this list. Not many people can tolerate the number of messages per day that this list generates. I've found that most people who register aren't on this list. Imagine a parallel universe in which there's another Euphoria list of equal size (say 400). Now imagine combining the two universes, so that instead of 70 messages per day we have 140 per day for 800 people. How many of those 800 people would continue to subscribe via e-mail? So you see, it isn't a linear thing, and a lot depends on how boring the messages are. We also lost a bunch of Hotmail and AOL people because of SPAM detection that people didn't know how to turn off. Regards, Rob Craig Rapid Deployment Software http://www.RapidEuphoria.com