Re: [Chicken-users] inventory of community skills

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Shawn Rutledge wrote:
> But you're saying I'm going to have
> trouble with mouse events, right?

I'd call it gruntwork rather than trouble.  Mouse events on everyone's 
pet OS is a boring problem.  Plenty of OpenGL windowing toolkits have 
dealt with it in some way.  But there's a plethora of such toolkits out 
there, without any one of them clearly being a preferred solution.  To 
me this says the problem is probably just boring gruntwork, and the 
results are totally dependent on the persistence of the particular 
people working on the particular projects.  It's very easy to get sick 
of things and to lapse into irrelevance or an insufficiently maintained 
state.  Generally, I think this is why people hate external 
dependencies.  A lot of external things aren't that dependable, so you 
end up throwing up your hands and solving it in your own code.  Most 
people can maintain their own code easier than someone else's code.

> > I'd say pick the ONE thing that Chicken--or even Scheme itself, 
> > seriously
> > lacks that noone wants to touch with a ten foot pole. You could ask this
> > entire list what it is and after a while a consensus would form. Take
>
> Would that be threading?  :-)

If I get into Cell Broadband Engine development (the guts of the 
Playstation3) then I might care.  But I'll surely care in a 
Cell-specific way, which will probably be useless for application 
developers in general.  If I don't get into the Cell BE, then I won't care.

I don't think, in general, that we can pick some "one" thing that 
Chicken really needs and then all pitch in to do it.  I think what we 
can do, is establish what we're personally interested in, and then ask 
who's willing to lead such-and-such an effort.  I would expect community 
energies to split in various directions.  I also think that's healthy.  
I may not care much about widgets, but they are useful for various kinds 
of programming, and Chicken can grow if someone coughs them out.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every