[Grace-core] beginning of draft email to supporters

[James Noble]

Hi Kim & Andrew

so here's a beginning of a draft email to supporters.
I'm not very good at doing these kinds of things -
so feel free to edit it etc.

It's not complete: particualrly, we should think if we want
to do anything that could involve some of these people
around e..g the ECOOP PC meeting -- ECOOP next
year is probably far enough away that we can be
very vague.

Andrew: many thanks again for putting me up
over the weekend, and inviting me to your housewarming
party!


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Subject: Progress on Grace (New OO language)

Dear supporters

a brief email to update you about our progress on the new OO language
project to date, to outline our plans for the near future, and suggest
some ways in which you could become more directly involved!

In the four months since ECOOP, we have made some progress on the
language design. We have refined the principles from the manifesto,
and identified a target user model for the language. We are working
towards a first-pass "strawman" language design, which we hope will be
ready for your critique by the end of the year.  We have chosen a name
for the language: Grace.

Last week, we formally announced the project to the wider OOPL
community with two panels at OOPSLA - one at the educator's symposium
and one at the main conference, also including Alex Buckley and Jens
Palsberg as discussants who were not part of the language effort.
We've attached a few slides presented at the panel. The panels were
covered in the CACM blog and also reported by other bloggers.  While
it is early days yet, the panels were generally well received, and
several new people have indicated they support the effort - and
perhaps that they will be able to contribute substantially in the new
year.

As part of ensuring the language design work is as open as possible,
we have established a rudimentary web-site and blog, at
http://gracelang.org, We plan to try to write short articles at least
weekly to provide evidence of ongoing interest in the project.  We
have also established a mailing list, grace-interest at cs.pdx.edu, for
supporters and others interested in the project - ***you have all been
subscribed to this list** (what are the rules about that list?)

To support detailed design work, we have a second (higher traffic)
email list: "grace-core" for the core language designers, along with a
wiki and svn repository. If you would really like to follow our
emerging work-in-progress very closely (or have posting rights on the
public blog) then email black at cs.pdx.edu including a username/password
pair generated by "hhtpasswd -n <username of your choice>" and we can
grant you access.



* what do we want to plan for next year?
  * February - something aligned to the ECOOP PC?
  * - late may/early june meeting aligned with PLDI
  * ECOOP - July, Lancaster
  * OOPSLA - Portland, a year from now.