Roadmap

[camshaft]

Hey I was just wondering if there was a roadmap for joxa. I'd love to start contributing anywhere I can help.

[ericbmerritt]

@camshaft unfortunately know. There hasn't been a ton of interest and I just haven't had time of late. If we get some folks interested I can start laying out the work that needs to be done to get to 1.0.

[camshaft]

Honestly that would be awesome. Joxa is one of the cleanest, most elegant languages I've used and I think a lot of people would benefit.

I'm not sure why the lack of interest but I have some guesses. Elixir, for example, is getting a lot of hype. Most people mention the ability to do meta-programming as a big feature. Joxa's implementation is much cleaner and more complete in that aspect. Joxa is also a simpler language all around which I think is a huge win.

However the elixir documentation is really nice. Same with their tools (mix, iex, etc). This, IMO, is where joxa could see some improvement. I think there is a lot of interest for a lisp on the erlang vm but when developers go to try the language they lose interest because they hit barriers. Here's a few things I ran into:

• the lack of readline support in the repl (I know it's solved by rlwrap but it's not really mentioned in the docs)
• no tab completion in the repl
• the docs are unclear on a few core things (like the &rest args)
• the docs are unfinished
• no quick-start or interactive tour of the language (something like http://www.tryerlang.org/ or http://try-elixir.herokuapp.com/)
• there are no real-world examples (not just a fibonacci server 😉) of how to get up and running. I think this is huge in helping people understand the power of it.
• the amount of activity on the project also indicates a stale ecosystem so people are less willing to commit

Most of these things don't have anything to do with the core language and technology itself but the tools and community around it. I would love to help out on these things. I really want joxa to succeed. It solves many of the problems I'm trying to do in a very elegant way.

Thoughts?

[sinasamavati]

@ericbmerritt I'm interested. Also, I would like to make more contributions to the project in my spare time, so having a Roadmap would be great.

@camshaft Yeah, Joxa is not well-documented, and it doesn't have a noisy community, maybe that's because people don't try it out.
I already made a very simple Leptus example in Joxa. here it is: https://github.com/s1n4/joktus

[camshaft]

@s1n4 haha noisy communities help a lot 😄. That's a great example! It would be great if things like that were more discoverable.

@ericbmerritt I've got quite a bit of time to dedicate to contributing so a roadmap would be awesome

[ericbmerritt]

@camshaft I agree with everything you have said above. There are some things missing as well. For example, the joxa implementation needs a fair amount of cleanup and we need to start thinking about building out a 'stdlib' so to speak. Also a tool or set of tools in which to generate documentation for joxa code and maybe even a place for people to publish that.

Here is what I suggest. Why don't you come up with an initial roadmap based on what we have discussed here. Ask any questions you need to ask and I will answer. Once we have that in place I will fill in any wholes that need to be filled in. (you are 50% of the way there already).

What do you think?

[ericbmerritt]

@KlausTrainer can probably provide some help here as well.

[camshaft]

@ericbmerritt yeah I'd love to! i'll start it in the wiki.

[ericbmerritt]

Lets not close this. We can use it for coordination. We can close it when we have a roadmap.

[camshaft]

makes sense. sorry 'bout that :)

[ericbmerritt]

Once we get a set of goals into the wiki. Lets start creating issues and milestones for them.

[monkeygroover]

Hi, it is unclear how to get started with joxa. From the docs "If you are using Windows, install a recent Erlang (R15B or newer), add Erlang’s bin directory to your path, and drop joxa.cmd in there too." but I cannot find joxa.cmd in any of the downloads. What would I need to do? cheers

[ericbmerritt]

@monkeygroover I suspect strongly that windows support has bitrotted over time. We don't currently have any windows users :/