This is bizarre: people seem to be using the diaries to communicate, rather than the article system. But the population of Advogato (and presumably the number of diary entries) seems to be growing pretty much exponentially, and who has the time to click through all the diary entries to check out the topics even now, never mind when there's 2^some_big_number people writing them...

To Java or not?

Anyway, I'll give it a go: noticed some of the comments re Java (hi, pvg). I have been blathering about starting a new project for ages, thoroughly annoying various people by not actually producing anything (hi thi, suspect you may well be lurking here somewhere ;-). I KNOW the ideal language for it is Scheme, but: it would take me twice as long to get up to any kind of speed in Scheme as a language I already know, I need to improve my Java for job-related reasons, and a large part of the potential users are not unixy people, they're died-in-the-wool windows users. So I'm planning on using Java. But there's no clarity in Java, as far as licenses go: I want my program to be gpl, but to avoid rewriting the wheel I'm going to have dependencies on several non-gpled programs; pccts/antlr, for example (that one's not a particular problem), as well as all that Swing vs AWT nonsense... Is trying to find my way past all that kind of crap going to mean I actually take longer than doing it another way? (don't know C++; don't like what I know of C++; vanilla C isn't really right for this thing). And will using Java put everyone else off helping out? Dither, dither, dither: I'll never be hacker material, dithering seems to be so much easier than coding ;-)