Re: How do you earn money with Guile?

[Tristan Colgate]

If you are adaptable, interested, and productive, you can earn money.
Frankly, if you learn a language because of its industry position on any
given day, you're going to have a very narrow view of your craft.

To play the game a bit, I earned money writing guile, or rather, I wrote
guile to earn money. I wrote guile-snmp to manage several large networks.
guile-snmp was developed to run parts of the NHS.net network (I re-wrote
several tools back to perl net-snmp for the benefit of colleagues, but
tools were developed with guile-snmp first, far more quickly, and concisely
that I could have achieved otherwise). I used and extended it for a 5 or 6
years and it became by far the best SNMP reporting tool I've ever used
(yes, I'm biased). I'm no longer in the network management business, and
SNMP has (unjustly) fallen out of favour, so sadly I don't really do much
with it any more.

  More importantly, I learnt an enormous amount about functional
programming, learned to really lovee lisp (and scheme, and guile). That
knowledge definitely made me a better programmer. It made me really "get"
various aspects javascript development that I'd have struggled with
otherwise. Got me interested in SML and haskell (the alternatives to the
cult of lambda).

  So my time with guile has, indirectly,  gotten me plenty of jobs, even if
the people that hired me didn't know it.



On Fri, 3 Jun 2016 at 18:58 Christopher M. Hobbs <address@hidden>
wrote:

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> On Fri, 03 Jun 2016 11:32:24 +0200
> Arne Babenhauserheide <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > 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!
> >
>
> In today's development ecosystem, I fear a language won't gain any
> popular traction (and thereby cause profit to be gained) until you can
> build a blog or some other inane web application in it... preferably in
> under 5 minutes.  It doesn't matter how well the language does anything
> else.
>
> At the risk of derailing the thread, I think a better approach would be
> to show things that guile can do.  This seems to help the popularity of
> languages.
>
> And to contribute:  I wrote a couple of bits of guile at work for
> monitoring some system processes, which I was paid for.  I've also used
> it in a side project related to mail processing that may someday
> generate income but that's still a long way off.
>
> cmh
>
> - --
> Happy Hacking!
>
> http://libernil.net/~cmhobbs
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