Re: guile user base

[rixed]

Thank you all for your responses.

The target audience of the newsletter I was contemplating being free
software hackers rather than inexperienced programmers, I don't think
a wiki, a stackoverflow-style website nor a web forum would suit ; In
essence because the information that would be provided would be
obsolete quite quickly.

There are certainly many cool things that could be done to attract
newcomers - first and foremost, update the web site as mentioned - but
that's not my intent for many reasons (mostly, I think guile is more
useful as a free software extension tool than as a general programming
learning tool, but this is of topic). What _I_ feel the need of, being
part of the herd of free software programmers inexperienced with scheme,
is a succinct and up to date source of news related to the project, so
that I can:

- see how well or how bad things are going
- what's coming
- what's requiring help
- what other projects use guile and how
- how to make the most of this or that uber-feature
- ideas of new things to try
- examples of common problems and solutions
- explanations on how things work from the inside
- etc...

In short, anything to keep me up to date, give my ideas and knowledge.
I believe this can be useful to people already using guile as well as
attract the attention of potential new users.

A monthly newsletter of the size of the Chicken Gazette looks appropriate
to me. As for the free time I'm willing to spend on this, well, I'm
offering to compile a first edition only in the hope that other people
would volunteer for the next, as :

- I'm not knowledgeable in Guile not Scheme
- I have not many time per week for anything that's not coding (pity my
  children)
- I'm not comfortable with English
- Scheme comes only third in my list of favorite programming languages
  (C and OCaml being the firsts, for those interested)

Anyway, I'm going to try to compile some first newsletter with abstracts
from the guile MLs and IRC channel. I may also bug some people
personally for some more infos. Then I will host the thing, buz about
it a little and see what I catch in my net :-)
Enough talking, we will see then.