Dylan: the harsh realities of the market

For better or worse, I've been pushing Dylan forward heavily over the last few years and am effectively the primary maintainer.

Over the last couple of years, we've made a lot of progress. We've completely revived the documentation from 1990s era FrameMaker files and have it published via a pretty modern system. We've converted from SVN to Git and moved to GitHub. We've done 4 actual releases. We've improved our platform portability. We've provided some basic debugging integration with LLDB. We've fixed some long standing issues in the compiler and tool chain. We've improved the GC integration on all platforms.

But there's a lot to do. We need to fix our Unicode support. We need to improve the type system in at least minor ways if not major ways. We need to improve how parse failures are handled as the errors are not always friendly. We need more libraries. Some of this is really easy, some isn't. But for pretty much everything, there are bite-sized pieces of work that could be done in a couple of hours/week that would lead to significant gains.

I've wanted to just flat out use Dylan for something and have built some small prototypes with it and while they've worked out well enough, the actual projects themselves didn't go anywhere (unrelated to the use of Dylan).

I think this blog post was triggered by a comment that I'd made publicly yesterday that I'm feeling rather discouraged at this point. There was also a private email that I sent to 19 people who have been involved with Dylan recently, but the author of this post didn't get that email.

I view Dylan, not as a language from the past, but as a stepping ladder towards building a better language for the future. We don't have to get bogged down in a lot of the minutiae involved in creating a new language as a lot of the work has been done. We get to focus on things at a different level and those things are just as important. People bring up Goo often when Dylan comes up. Goo is interesting, but the implementation is nothing close to being industrial enough to survive an encounter with the real world.

I came to Dylan because I saw the mess that Scala and other languages were. I didn't like where they were going and following some people on Twitter like https://twitter.com/milessabin and others seems to show that I'm not alone.

And that's why I'll probably keep at it with Dylan. I want a better future and I'm going to keep trying to build it.

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