Hi Brian,

(I didn't see your original post, perhaps it got caught in my UCE filter.)

This topic comes up fairly regularly. My thoughts on this have changed subtly over the years and i'll share my current view.

I don't think the pike community has died or is dying, but it also has not reached the critical mass necessary to propel it to the forefront of people's attention, like you see with other languages like ruby or python. a lot of folks won't even consider something without the buzz or large quantities of online material, and and that's a shame. to be sure, there are shortcomings in pike and it's ecosphere, the primary one being documentation, which is slowly improving. however, there's nothing that would stop an enterprising developer from getting the job done using pike.

My observation is there are a lot of sheep out there: folks that seem to look for the easy solution (which is often completely understandable)... "has someone already done what i need so that I can just copy and paste it?" People looking for that will ultimately end up being disappointed by Pike at some point. However, I'm not aware of any reasonable pike related question having ever gone unanswered. Now, it may be that the answer was that "no one's done that before" and the conversation ends there if the person was just looking to be handed the solution. That said, if there were a follow up that went something like: "ok, so how might one approach the problem", i've never had anyone not provide feedback.

So, I think I'm okay with Pike not having taken over the world. I used to think it'd be great if it did, and would try to come up with ways to help. I've since come to realize that taking over the world means 1% of the critical mass being people who were interested in helping, and the rest being "scavengers". I still think it'd be great to reach that tipping point with Pike, but I'd rather spend my time helping those interested in helping themselves (and perhaps sharing their knowledge, too). In fact, it's not uncommon for me to spend an evening on something for someone with a need, even if it wasn't something I had much use for.

I think that sentiment is also shared by a large percentage of the (really quite brilliant) pike core developers and experts you'll run into. I encourage you to not give up and to not suffer in silence- ask if you've got a question or need help finding something.

As a side note, I've been thinking about the ideal candidate for conversion to the pike way. I think that trying to convince someone who loves python or ruby is a lost cause. I think that those languages are arcane and hard to follow, but someone who loves them is going to think of pike that way. A much better approach, in my opinion is to find a java developer who's made the realization that java is an incredibly inefficient way to spend their development time (and who has a pathological aversion to C#). They'll appreciate the similarities and the things that "just work" in pike that you'd have to spend hours on in Java.

Incidentally, where are you located? It's entirely possible that there's a Pike guru near you and you might not even know it. Also, it's become a bit of a tradition to have a yearly meet-up, whether "officially sanctioned" or not. That usually happens in the autumn, usually in Europe somewhere. Sometimes it's just a few folks, sometimes a university brings 20 or 30 people for the afternoon. I highly encourage working it into your schedule if that's at all appealing.

Best,

Bill Welliver hww3@riverweb.com

On Jun 13, 2009, at 3:25 AM, Arne Goedeke wrote:

As a matter of fact, community building efforts have been discussed several times here. I am not so sure what the conclusion was, if any.

I would be glad to see something like a regular pike community meeting here in berlin but sadly right now I am surrounded by python developers. I would be grateful for ideas about how to convert some people, I am feeling a little alone ;)

arne

Brian Lacy schrieb:

...

I've just subscribed to the Pike mailing list, and I'm wondering if anyone is still out there in the Pike community. From what I can tell, at least through a rather exhaustive Google search, community support for this sweet little language has all but dried up completely!

For historical purposes, necessary or otherwise, the date is June 12, 2009.

Thanks, Brian