Re: Overcoming the "Dylan is Dead" belief?

On Sep 10, 2013, at 8:35 AM, Bruce Mitchener <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hey all,
> 
> Repeatedly, I have run into people who thought Dylan was long gone and dead.  People often think it was an Apple-only project and that when Apple killed Apple Dylan, it was the fatal blow and that there wasn't anything available.
> 
> This has been a common refrain in conversations, when we do a release ("Wow, I didn't know Dylan was still around."), and when others bring it up.
> 
> It has been suggested a number of times that we should consider renaming things to divorce ourselves from the past and allow people to get to know us under a new identity.  That'd be a lot of work though and would have issues with things like the DRM and DPG which we can't go and rename.  I also think that having the history is valuable at times in and of itself. Dylan had grand origins and it needn't shy away from them, perhaps.
> 
> What can we do? What should we do?

I don't think changing the name will improve adoption. Its history as an interesting and abandoned Apple experiment probably attracts more people than it repels.

It's probably easier to attract people to a new programming language now than it has been at any time in my career. You just need to know who would want the language, let them know clearly why they would want it, and make sure it's as easy as possible for them to find, get, and use it.

Others have already brought up the convenient libraries provided by languages like Python. I wonder how many non-Python users realize just how much stuff Python's library gives you. Take a look:

http://docs.python.org/2/library/

"Batteries included" indeed.

Obviously, Python isn't the only popular language, but that standard library sure doesn't hurt its adoption.
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