Chris Glur wrote:
> Aaron previously mentioned the News server problem.
> Does *that* News server control the poplog world community ?
Recently I have noticed that many newsgrups have much less messages
than they used to have. For me explanation is simple: my news
server expires most messages rather quickly (in one week ???).
I think that my news server used to keep messages longer (one month ???).
When news server expires messages quickly low traffic groups look
dormant. Also, it happened that I saw messages in comp.lang.pop
but I did not have time to follow up immediatly. Next time when
I read the newsgroup the message was not there (probably expired).
So I suspect that quick expiration reduces traffic even more...
Aaron Sloman wrote:
> There is another factor. In the years before the world wide web, when
> internet access was far more restricted, there was a lot of interesting
> discussion on news groups, e.g. comp.ai, comp.ai.philosophy among
> others.
Personaly I feel that Usenet is being destroyed by spam. My impression
is that 2-3 years ago quality of Usenet discussion increased (and
volume went down) -- I think that simply a lot of clueless folks
stopped posting at that time. However now many groups are just filled
with spam. Already many folks do not post on Usenet fearing that
spammers will harvest their e-mail addresses, now when spammers are
taking over the content I am affraid that people still reading
newsgroups will stop doing this.
Later Aaron wrote:
> I think we have a great resource which is underused for some good
> reasons (e.g. lack of a full blooded port to windows), and
> over-dependence on its own editor -- especially the use of file formats
> that nothing else can read, which was a dreadful mistake even though at
> the time the change was made it cause files to look much prettier in
> Ved. I always refused to use the fancy formats for any of my teaching
> materials or program documentation because I knew there would always be
> users who did not wish to use Ved.
I think that first barrier to use Pop11 is limited amount of teaching
materials. Do not get me wrong: reference documentation is adequate,
teach files, help files and the primer give good start. But only
rare folks can learn from reference documentation. Teach files cover
specific topics and are of little use if user is not interested in
this topics. The similar things affect primer: it is written in
specific style and with specific assumptions about readers.
Last year I was teaching intermediate programming course and I decided
to use Pop11 as one of languages for the course (I also used C and C++).
I feel that Pop11 allowed me to present some examples in simpler way
or to present them at all (C++ version would be too complicated).
But also I heard many complaints from the students, mostly about lack
of adequate teaching materials. The students finished the first
programmong course and already mastered basic programming skills.
For them most of introductory material was inadequate -- they
already knew how to do similar things (and more) in C++. OTOH they
had trouble finding out how to do thing they wanted to do.
Another things is that there are many languages which offer advanced
programming concepts and try to make programming easier. I would
mention here Java, Perl, Python, Tcl, Lisp, Scheme, Dylan, Smaltalk,
Mocart/Oz and SML. I find combination of features offered by Pop11
pretty attractive, but OTOH I see that Pop11 may easily become extinct.
Namely, people now want ready to use solutions -- languages that
help them deliver are used. Popular languages today bundle large
libraries of reusable components. Most small project having
freedom to choose language would immediatly reject Pop11 because
of lack of "built in" support for something considered essential
(like embedding in a web server, database connectivity or adeqate
widgets).
--
Waldek Hebisch
hebisch@math.uni.wroc.pl
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