Re: How do you earn money with Guile?

[Nala Ginrut]

It's an interesting topic. Although I planed to share something when I earn
more money, now that someone raised it... :-)

Here I give you two real cases.

The first one is that we use Guile to send command from UART to control a
small robot. We made it in a sponsored hackathon. And earned the highest
award in couple of hours, about $1500 (10,000 Chinese yuan). People never
saw such a project, as the journalist wrote: "they ask the robot to write
just 3 Chinese characters and get 10,000 yuan."
It's an interesting story, I will write it in my blog. I wrote the
prototype in Guile, but the hackathon day I have to go to church, and my
friends encoutered problems, then someone have to rewrite it in Forth, or
we may lost the chance in time. But the name of the project is
lambda-tortoise, since it's in Scheme originally. Of course it's free
project, and yes I wrote a thing to let Guile control serial port. But I
haven't gotten time to release it.
Here is the media report:
http://m.leiphone.com/news/201510/Hk7mizNbynrIInam.html

The second case is that I wrote a complete video multicasting system for a
primary school. It's a serious business project, I spent lot of time to
debug and deploy. The priciple is not complicated, there's server-side
written in GNU Artanis (of course it's pure Guile Scheme) provided RESTful
APIs, and more than 50 raspberryPI as client nodes (running some scripts to
interact with the server), each node control a TV set. The operator could
control nodes in groups, or monitor heartbeat, and even give command to it
(shutdown or replay certain video).
The old solution is very expensive for the school, and can not be scalable.
I use Artanis for quick develop, and raspberryPI is cheap. So I helped them
to solve the scalability problem, now if they want to add new node, just
buy a raspberryPI, and flash a card with a customized system, connect to
network, plug to the TV set, and just power it, it'll be recognized by
server and push the latest video list. Very easy for them.
Besides, my server is faster then their old solution which runs on Windows
with dot net. They surprised that how my server can be so fast to upload 1G
video in few seconds. And I surprised too, how can they endure such
performance these years, 200M video they have to wait 10 minutes.
For such a result all beyond their expectation. I get well paid, consider I
just spent two days for programming(more time spent on debug and deploy), I
think it's efficient to develop with Guile.

Well, I can't reveal how much money for this project. But it's far more
than the number of the award I mentioned in the first case.
And unfortunately, they bought all the code, so I can't free it to you. I
really want to persuade them to free it to make this project as a perfect
case of free software. But it's high customized system to meet their
specific need. They don't want to reveal it for many reasons.

Anyway, Artanis become stronger after this real business project. I think
it's the most important.

And I have to say frankly, I can earn the money is not because I use Guile,
but because I know how to solve the problem. Although the ability of
solving problem is unrelated to the language, it's good for you to choose a
good language for better develop experiences. Guile is a practical one in
Scheme world. To my experience, Scheme is flexible enough when your code
base increase, that is to say, you don't have to refactor frequently to
meet your new needs, all the old part are easy to intergrate with your new
code. For an Object-Oriented user, this may not surprise, but what if you
drop your heavy object system and do the job in a light way?

I think I'm the only one who refuse OO (yes, extreamly intended) in Scheme
programming. I just want to see, to what extent, we may drop OO for same
purpose in Scheme. OK, I confess I'm cheating, since I use the inheritance
in record-type in r6rs. But it's the only cheating. :-)

Arne Babenhauserheide <address@hidden>于2016年6月3日周五 17:47写道：

> Hi,
>
> > “I would take Guile seriously when someone earned money with it.”
> > — someone from IRC
>
> When I saw this on IRC, I realized that the there’s something to it:
> When a professional sees something new and is unsure whether it can be
> useful to business, it’s sensible to first check whether someone else
> already earns money with it. That doesn’t work for the first person, but
> it works for all others.
>
>
> So I want to ask you: Do you earn part of your income by programming
> with Guile?
>
>
> I’ll go first: I used Guile for a few tasks for my PhD thesis (which I
> got paid for).
>
> The first main task was to assemble commandlines for my plotting tool
> where my previous shell scripts became a maintenance nightmare. All in
> all that’s about 300 lines of Guile Scheme. I’ll be using Guile for this
> again in the following months.
>
> The second main task was to build an Ensemble Kalman Filter to get a
> deeper understanding of the method. That’s about 266 lines of Guile wisp
> and available online:
>
> https://bitbucket.org/ArneBab/wisp/src/v0.9.0/examples/ensemble-estimation.w
>
>
> I’d be glad to hear how you earn money with Guile!
>
>
> Best wishes,
> Arne Babenhauserheide
>
> PS: Earning money with Free Software is awesome!
>
>