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Everyone who is fluent in Scheme, raise your hand...

Posted Dec 5, 2002 6:03 UTC (Thu) by dank (guest, #1865)
Parent article: Coming soon: gnucash 1.8

The editor asks why few people are contributing to GnuCash.
One possible reason is it's largely written in Scheme,
a language known by few. The GnuCash crew all love Scheme
and would rather quit the project than use any other language.
Result: a program nobody has much of a chance of understanding.
I do wish them well; perhaps they will singlehandedly save
Scheme from oblivion.

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Dec 5, 2002 9:06 UTC (Thu) by aglet (guest, #1334) [Link]

*raises hand*

The Sawmill window manager is also a heavy user of Scheme. And Emacs Lisp is not hugely different. I have no idea how many bazillion lines of Emacs Lisp have been written....

Incidentally, anyone wanting to learn Scheme could do worse than fiddle with either Sawfish or Emacs, alternatively if you prefer books pick up a copy of the MIT textbook "structure and interpretation of computer programs".

Everyone who is fluent in Scheme, raise your hand...

Posted Dec 5, 2002 16:10 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

/raise my hand.

Don't need gnucash, though.

Joachim

Everyone who is fluent in Scheme, raise your hand...

Posted Dec 5, 2002 20:48 UTC (Thu) by jdavisp3 (guest, #4881) [Link]

This is a very common misconception about GnuCash.

There are pieces of GnuCash, such as reports and graphs,
which are written in Scheme, but there are also very large
pieces, inluding much of the GUI, written in C. There are
far more lines of C in GnuCash than there are lines of Scheme.
You can contribute a lot to GnuCash without knowing any Scheme.

Everyone fluent in C raise your hand...

Everyone who is fluent in Scheme, raise your hand...

Posted Dec 12, 2002 0:14 UTC (Thu) by conrad_c (guest, #8516) [Link]

As others have pointed out, large chunks of the application are coded in languages other than scheme. But even if that wasn't the case, is coding the only way to contribute?

Hands up all those fluent in a real-world language, like, say English (or even American.. :-)).

Our docs can always use an extra pair of eyes (although the current docs developer is doing a fantastic job). And theres plenty of translation work to be done.