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Although the tone of his mail was quite provocative (I think he did it on purpose), I must admit I agree with what Alexander said. This corresponds to my impression of guile. I looked into extension languages only a few days ago, so my feeling is that of a newbie in *using* those languages. If it can be of some help, here are the impressions I got at a first glance: * The docs are absolutely out of date. This makes guile unusable unless you're a guile developper yourself. You can't ask people to learn the code by heart in order to be able to use a package. This is a real showstopper for new people to get involved too. * Another showstopper is the apparent lack of will to help newcomers solving their problems. OK, it's August. But I don't see how you can expect to get more people involved in the developpement if you don't help them getting started. * You can't either expect people to use the snapshots. People need stable releases. I'm not against the idea of moving the API, if it can improve it. But people must be informed of the incompatible changes from stable release to stable release. * As far as I could see, but again, this is a newbie view, the gh API seems strange, uncomplete and inconsistent. Some examples: - Why using so many functions with just a `return' line, instead of a set of standardized macros ? Something like BOOLEAN_P instead of gh_boolean_p. - What's the point in having gh_number_p but not gh_integer_p and the like, if people will need to mix the APIs anyway ? - A guy that discovers gh_catch and logically looks for gh_throw, but doesn't find it ... - etc etc. All this looks like a mess. Again, my view is the one of somebody discovering the package, but I think guile developpers currently lack feelings from people like me. I hope this can help identify the caveats in the project. I've found out about Elk after a recent mail on this list, and I immediately switched to it. In one day reading/coding I could do much more things with it than in a week investigating guile sources. That's the point. -- / / _ _ Didier Verna http://www.inf.enst.fr/~verna/ - / / - / / /_/ / E.N.S.T. INF C214 mailto:verna@inf.enst.fr /_/ / /_/ / /__ / 46 rue Barrault Tel. (33) 01 45 81 80 72 75634 Paris cedex 13 Fax. (33) 01 45 81 31 19