[racket] Blog post about Racket

> On May 10, 2014, at 8:42 AM, Konrad Hinsen wrote:
>
>> given Racket’s academic and teaching background, it is quite possible that there are lots of students using Racket who find sufficient support locally that they never manifest themselves on the mailing list.

Separate from the local support that Matthias mentioned, there seems to 
be a phenomenon of current students not wanting to be on non-university 
email lists.

When I started the "boston-lisp-announce" local email list several years 
ago (serving a geographic area that includes Northeastern, MIT, Harvard, 
and many other universities) -- and emphasized that the email list was 
low-traffic, announcements-only for events like local Lisp-related 
talks, social get-togethers, and job postings -- I could not get hardly 
any Lisp-using current undergrads or even Lisp-using grad students to 
join it.

Over 100 people not a current student in the Boston area did join the 
email list, however.  From gray-bearded LISP people, to co-authors of 
RnRS, to many enthusiastic professionals and hobbyists.  Just hardly any 
current students.

Maybe the distinction is not just students.  There was one local company 
that had lured a significant percentage of top CL programmers from 
around the world for a major software project, as well as briefly being 
the most popular employer for new CS grads here.  Even when the 
(expressly low-traffic, announcements-only) email list was promoted to 
CL-using people at this company directly, very few of them joined.

Regardless of the reason(s), one of the effects of this phenomenon -- of 
many users of a thing not participating in what you'd think would be a 
key venue for the thing -- is that you can't use that email list to 
determine how much use the thing gets.

You can, however, take an email list for what it is: some subset who 
choose to participate in a particular venue of users of the thing. And 
you can engage with those people.  In the case of Racket, the email list 
is active and high-quality, and I think that's one of the big wins of 
Racket.

Neil V.