[nem-en] Future of Nemerle

[Michal Moskal]

On 12/8/05, Kenneth Ismert <kismert at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I like Nemerle a lot, despite my struggles to learn it. It has a very
> interesting set of features, and uses a lot of great technology. It
> still looks like a very promising platform for long-term development on
> my part.

Thanks!

> But one question nags me: what is the future of Nemerle? I am worried
> about the Jython scenario: lone genius builds Jython, lone genius gets
> bored, leaves it unfinished, and moves to Microsoft. Lone genius builds
> IronPython, cycle repeats...?
>
> So what's the long-term plan for Nemerle? Once malekith, nazgul, and
> trupill move on, will the language still be in active development, or
> is this just a giant graduate thesis project?

What I should have done earlier is to look for 1st and 2nd year students
willing to help us. I will dedicate more time to this now. There should
be also a Nemerle course in our Institute, starting Sep 2006, which will
hopefully result in some new people joining the team. But I cannot promise
anything here...

I think in general the problem is that the community behind Nemerle is
too small. For example the one behind Boo seems much larger (judging from
mailing list traffic).  OTOH the F# list has similar level of traffic
to ours, so maybe the problem is with functional programming.

Anyway if the community was stronger, you wouldn't be worried that the
compiler will stay unmaintained (it's Open Source world!).

So the real problem is how to improve the community. It seems I'm not
very good at it. I would welcome some ideas in this area.

> What part does University of Wroclaw play in all of this?

There is no formal group supporting Nemerle inside the University. It
just so happens that most of the creators of Nemerle were UWr students,
so the copyright stays with the University. This doesn't matter much
(perhaps at all), because it's a BSD-like copyright.

--
   Michal Moskal,
   http://nemerle.org/~malekith/