Re: Kawa experience [was: the right way to compile and load modules]

[Charles Turner <chturne at gmail dot com>]

On 14 May 2014 19:59, Per Bothner <per@bothner.com> wrote:
> I'll be writing an "intro to Kawa" article for LWN soon,
> so it is useful to know what to emphasize.

I'm very pleased to hear you'll be writing an article. I look forward
to reading it!

I gave a 30 minute talk recently about Kawa, its history, its design
and demo'd some code. The majority of people were amazed they had
never heard of this project before and seemed enthusiastic to at least
play with it. A minority (~ 5 out of ~ 20 people) were of the "why are
people still messing around with this Lisp bullshit?" persuasion; the
ones you lose as soon as they see the parens. I didn't have slides or
anything, it was informal get together. My limited experience of this
sort of thing however is that people want to see what "real stuff"
looks like in the language, they're not as interested in the
implementation details and history of Lisp. They're dying to know what
it buys them. I think the art of expository pieces is to provide
instant gratification by example. Once people are interested, they'll
look up the gory details for themselves. I'm very excited & interested
to hear what people are doing with Kawa beyond just messing about, I
think case studies from these groups are immensely valuable.

Just my opinion of course, not an experienced speaker/teacher by any
stretch of the imagination!

Kind regards,
Charles.