[Shootout-list] Great Shootout

[skaller]

On Sun, 2004-11-14 at 05:56, Isaac Gouy wrote:

> Obviously the Felix is a priority - a priority for John.

Indeed, since I'm working very hard on getting the
tests done. I really do wish you'd cease such sarcastic
comments -- they're uninformed and not productive.

FYI I have spent over 5 years full time on Felix,
forgoing over half a million dollars of income
in the processes, and 3 decades researching programming
language design, including 10 years representing my
country on the ISO C++ Standardisation committee.

Felix is an effort to provide programmers with
a superior programming language.

Whether or not it actually does that is open to
debate and I'm happy to discuss that.

But when you're questioning my motivation with sarcasm
and snide remarks I'm just going to get angry.

> Meanwhile there's almost as little traffic to the Shootout website as
> there is to the Felix website. Maybe it's become too obscure.

Three comments on that.

(1) Alioth is unreliable. I'm not sure
if this is related to the recent security scare,
and the problem will go away eventually. A considerable
percentage of times, I can't access the Shootout pages,
some of these times I checked and some of these times
can't access the main Alioth page either.

(2) The shootout website has recently changed and this
may have an impact -- both the change itself and the
new layout.

(3) Interest in the shootout is likely to be two fold:
(a) the usual visitor profile (regulars + occasional newbies)
(b) visitors inspired to come by news items posted in
newsgroups, weblogs, slash dot, magazine articles, etc.

The change in website design itself probably warrants
some advocacy which could lead to more traffic.

In addition, inclusion of Felix is likely to increase
traffic because it's a new language challenging the established
ones, and because the primary reference at the moment for
comparing it with other languages is the Shootout.
So provided it is allowed to stand against the other
languages on its technical merits, I'm likely to
direct people interested in Felix to the Shootout,
possibly even as the *first* place to go, before
even looking at the Felix homepage.


-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
voice: 061-2-9660-0850, 
snail: PO BOX 401 Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
Checkout the Felix programming language http://felix.sf.net