(Meta) Guile and direction (Re: Syntatic sugar and identifier permissivity)

[Lalo Martins <lalo at hackandroll dot org>]

On Tue, Apr 04, 2000 at 11:20:46AM -0700, Craig Brozefsky wrote:
> Lalo Martins <lalo@hackandroll.org> writes:
> 
> > I'm beginning to feel Guile doesn't really care about whether
> > people use it or not. It definitely feels more like an
> > "academic" project than something for everyone to use on a
> > day-to-day basis; more like an effort to have a really cool
> > Scheme implementation (which, as nice as it is, would mean
> > zilch for the majority of the computer users in the world) than
> > an flexible extension/scripting tool.
> 
> Stop trolling.

I'm not trolling. People are NOT using Guile and the project
isn't walking in any direction that has any chance of changing
this. When people think "extension/scripting" they think either
Perl or Python and with good reason, just like when they think
"free OS" they think "Linux" (which is wrong IMO but anyway).

I don't have anything against Guile becoming a "purely
academic/experimental" project or a "cool Scheme
implementation"; but if this is the case, it should definitely
not be "advertised" as anything else. Currently there are 4
different Guiles:

- how the community sees Guile
  (a nice Scheme interpreter and a moving-target,
  hard-to-code-for extension library)
- how GNU sees Guile
  (generic tool for extension and scripting)
- how about 60% of the active developers see Guile
  (a study on perfection, where we should implement all things
  the way the academic CS comunity considers "Right" (TM),
  regardless of what the rest of the world thinks about them)
- how other ~60% sees Guile
  (a very cool Scheme implementation)

(note that yes, I can count; the 60% figures mean there is some
overlap, some developers who think both C and D at the same time)

The problem here is not that I disagree with C and D; my
opinion has absolutely no importance in this regard, since I'm
not writing code for this project. The problem is that A and B
and C and D are somewhat incompatible.

What Guile _really really_ needs IMVHO is direction.

[]s,
                                               |alo
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