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Comment by BruceM | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, it isn't ready yet. We're catching up as we bring things back up to date after some years of being left to rest.

We're also not there (yet) with libraries that people commonly expect in this day and age.

We were hoping this would be a lower profile release as we learn how to make a new release and get our systems automation in place (as well as improving platform support).

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As unfortunately is not low profile any more, could you guys make some main point on why one should adopt dylan? Maybe a comparison with Python/Ruby etc.?

I have been intressted in dylan for some time. Here is my take on it. Dylan is just an awesome language, you will have to learn some dylan to find out if you agree. It has great potential to be a dynamic language that is really really fast, the compiler and gc are already really good. Its a really intressting project to hack on, the compiler for example is written in dylan itself.

Its not ready to go into production use but if you want an awesome opensource project with loads of potential to hack on dylan might be just the thing.

The Dylan language spec has amazingly few edge cases. It allows a continuum of dynamic -> static typing and a range of functional <-> OO. With the right set of libraries it could be great in the scripting space as Python, but is also designed for building large systems that run fast.

Hope it all works for you. It would be great to find someone to convert the documentation to epub and mobi formats.

We dug up the original Framemaker files from the 90s and have been converting them to be processed by Sphinx (http://sphinx.pocoo.org/) into various formats. That should start to be included with the next release.

So, maybe next week?

;-)

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